UPDATED: Free up 30GB of space in 10 minutes

Quick ways to free space on your Xamarin Mac computer

A Xamarin Developer’s Collector’s Scroll for 2022

The First Prototype
5 min readApr 7, 2020

Are you also trying to update to to the latest MacOS or XCode, but there’s no space on your MacBook Pro? Did you also think you would get by with the 128/256 GB SSD, but then you find out the “7GB” XCode unpacks into 20GB? I am sure you already tried to fiddle with the Storage Management, but it wasn’t much help, and now you are wondering if it’s time to buy another Mac.

Common error when trying to update XCode

Not yet partner! Your MacBook still has many years on it, and now’s not the time to give up! Mac computers are expensive for a reason. There’s still several ways to save space, and I have collected the quickest steps that saved me >1GB (up to 5GB) each, and split this article into Xamarin, iOS, Android & Other Resources. Important points to keep in mind:

  • The “~” sign used in this article refers to the User folder that holds the Documents and Downloads folders, or “Users/saamer/” in my case.
  • You might need to enable viewing hidden files first. To view hidden files, just open Finder and press command+shift+. and those files and folders should appear. You can verify this by going here ~/.

The Quick & Easy

  • Xcode occupies nearly 20Gb of space. You can just remove it from your Applications folder and then delete it from your Trash. For the most part, that should suffice, and it generally takes the same time to re-download Xcode as it does to just update it. If you just require a little bit of space, you can try the others mentioned below.

Storage Management — Developer page

More recent versions of MacOS have a Developer page inside the Storage Management app. All of these files are generally purgeable. So just select them all and Delete.

Storage Management — Documents

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The First Prototype

Developers building things, on here to share knowledge. Featured blog for PlanetXamarin.com github.com/saamerm linkedin.com/in/saamer