Xcode Archives & iOS DeviceSupport: What's Safe to Delete?

July 2026 · 6 min read · Dev Box Cleaner

DerivedData gets all the attention, but two other Xcode folders quietly hoard gigabytes for years: Archives and iOS DeviceSupport. One of them you can delete freely. The other deserves ten seconds of thought first. Here's the difference.

iOS DeviceSupport — delete freely

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport

Every time you plug in an iPhone or iPad running an iOS version Xcode hasn't seen before, Xcode copies that version's debug symbols to your Mac — typically 2–5 GB per iOS version, per architecture. Test with a few devices across a few years and this folder alone reaches 30 GB+.

Deleting it is harmless: if you later debug on a device with that iOS version again, Xcode simply re-copies the symbols from the device (a few minutes, once). Most developers only ever need the folders for iOS versions they actively test on.

du -sh ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS\ DeviceSupport/*
rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS\ DeviceSupport/*

There's a sibling folder for watchOS and tvOS too (watchOS DeviceSupport, tvOS DeviceSupport) — same rule applies.

Archives — delete, but read this first

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/Archives

Every Product → Archive you've ever made lives here: the built app plus its dSYM debug symbols. Archives of old test builds are dead weight. But the dSYMs of builds you actually shipped matter: they're what symbolicates crash reports from users on that exact build.

Rule of thumb:

• Keep archives of versions currently live on the App Store (or distributed to users), unless you're sure the dSYMs were uploaded to App Store Connect / your crash reporter (Crashlytics, Sentry…).
• Delete everything else — one-off test archives, abandoned apps, superseded versions.

You can manage them visually in Xcode via Window → Organizer → Archives (right-click → Delete), which is safer than raw rm -rf because you see names, versions and dates.

Simulators: the third space hog

While you're at it, old simulator runtimes and devices pile up too:

# delete simulators for platforms/versions you no longer use
xcrun simctl delete unavailable

# simulator caches are also fair game
rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Caches

How much can you get back?

On a 3-year-old iOS development Mac, a typical haul looks like this: DeviceSupport 20–40 GB, Archives 5–20 GB, simulator runtimes and caches 10–30 GB. Combined with DerivedData, freeing 50–100 GB is common — the difference between a full SSD and a comfortable one.