DevCleaner For Mac

Developers who have worked extensively with Apple's Xcode IDE know that building projects with support for multiple devices and targets will eventually mean that their Mac's hard drive will soon run out of space.

This happens because while Xcode is very good at creating and making available backup data you may need in a later stage of development, it doesn't provide users with a simple and straightforward way of managing it.

To perform such a task, you may want an application such as DevCleaner, a free and very easy to use little macOS tool designed with the purpose of helping developers free up disk space by reclaiming tens of gigabytes of hard drive space by deleting Xcode's derived data, archives, and device support files.

To be more precise, Xcode will store all data within the ~/Library/Developer folder, a folder that can accumulate anything from a few gigabytes of files to tens if not hundreds of gigabytes depending on the number of projects you work on and targets/platforms you have to build for.

Using DevCleaner to recover free disk space is just a matter of launching it, as it will automatically scan the ~/Library/Developer/ folder for you and will display a list of Device Support, Archives and Derived Data files you can clear up.

Once the main window is populated with the scan results, you can quickly select what type of Xcode cache you want to clear by clicking the check mark next to each entry.

It is also important to mention that DevCleaner will ask you to give it permission to access your Developer folder to be able to scan for files you may want to erase.

Unfortunately, even though the authorization dialog says that this will happen only once, DevCleaner will ask you to go through this step after each launch.

Just in case you will forget to do a hard drive cleanup once in a while, the DevCleaner can also be configured via the Preferences window to remind you every two weeks, each month or every two months to reclaim your disk space.

In a nutshell, if you are a developer who uses Xcode on a daily basis, and you find that your hard drive has less and less free disk space without an apparent reason, you may want to give DevCleaner a spin.

The app can help you clear out lots of gigabytes of unneeded files with just a couple of mouse clicks, and you won't have to jump through any hoops to do it.