Today I was checking the available disk space I had on my MacBook and noticed that it was more than 50% full. That definitely didn’t sound right so I used a disk space analyzer to check things out (I use DaisyDisk, you can download it here).

It turns out the culprit was our old friend, Xcode, and its Simulators plus Device Support files. Xcode stores Device Support files for every iOS version release and for every device that you plug into your Mac for debugging. There are also a simulator logs folder and the Runtime folder.

To free up at least some of this space, you can do the following:

  • All Device Support files are stored in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport/. In here you will find folders with names like: 13.4.1 (17E262). Check which iOS version you are still using for debugging and delete any old ones you don’t use anymore.
  • In /Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Profiles/Runtime you can find runtime support files for current or previous iOS versions, delete the version that you don’t use anymore.
  • From the Terminal you can run xcrun simctl delete unavailable so Xcode deletes all simulators that are now unavailable because you don’t have the runtime files for that specific iOS version anymore.
  • Finally, in ~/Library/Logs/CoreSimulator you can find logs for all the Simulators (you can delete everything here).

After doing all of the above I regained around 120GB of disk space on my Mac. This is after a year of use and just two major iOS releases so this can take up a lot of disk space in a very short time.