macOS Catalina keeps verifying xcode at startup

Here is the temporary fix:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250731084

"To turn of SIP, first you have to start your mac in recovery mode.

Then open the terminal and type

csrutil status

And if it confirms you that SIP is currently enabled on your system enter the command

csrutil disable

Restart and check if the problem persists.

Please do not forget to reenable SIP after apple has solved this issue in the next operation system update (hopefully) :)"

Hi all, finally I have my 2012 iMac working on Catalina, but it took 3 weeks of phone calls and debug information sent to Apple Portugal and several hours of my time (and some of my sleeping time) to solve this problem. I believe this problem it's an issue with some upgrades from Mojave to Catalina, restricted to this two process's, XprotectService and syspolicyd, being in some kind of conflict with Xcode. Although Apple Portugal never gave a definitive solution neither the true nature of the problem, their support was tireless, and in the end they put me in the right direction to solve the problem.

The only thing that worked out was:

• a full backup with the Time Machine
• then a clean install of the Catalina with the Cmd+Alt+R keys at boot, to perform an Internet Recovery boot
• then and in my case has I have a Fusion Drive, opened up a terminal window and made a reset of the Fusion Drive with the command "diskutil resetFusion" (without quotes). This command WILL ERASE ALL YOUR DATA. Make sure you have backed up all your data.
• make a clean install of Catalina
• with the time machine backup connected to your mac, when the migration assistant opens up, select the time machine backup - AND THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT - the only information that needs to be migrated are the users accounts, and the network and printers information (if you do not have problems with this information has some users have reported to have after the Catalina upgrade).
• after time machine migrates all the selected information, re-install all your apps and they start working has before, include Xcode.

These were the steps that solve my one hour boot up of Xcode.

Same here, talked to Apple support Portugal, and they have no clue. They suggested a safe boot. I did it. All the same again, even in safe boot.

Already did the usual stuff. Reinstall Xcode, from store and from xip file. Nothing works. For now my solution is to leave my iMac in sleep mode. I can't turn it off, or else it will take like an hour to become ready. It's not 4 minutes like you.

Catalina does the "Verifying Xcode", "Verifying ios10.3.simruntime", "Verifying ios11.2.simruntime" and so on... it takes about one hour. It's so frustrating.

Anyone with a solution?

Regards,

Nuno Simões

Same here. Called Apple support which was waste of time. The guy was clueless. He had me reinstall the operating system, something that took two days as my computer kept going to sleep before completing the download and had to restart the download from the beginning each time. For me, the Xcode being verified "forever" and slowing my computer to a crawl started after the first Catalina update. My computer was running full speed with the original Catalina install. Sending Xcode to Trash restores snappiness and speed. I can then reinstall Xcode and the computer runs full speed until restart, which starts the infinite Xcode verification process. I have another Apple, but a with a solid state drive and that one does not experience the slow down. I am so fed up with Apple releasing crappy code. There is no reason a machine with i7, 16Gb of RAM and 1 Tb hard drive should not handle any Mac operating system. Very frustrating...

I did use time machine, yes. But note, it was a bit of rough sailing for me. The good news is, I got everything restored (eventually) with time machine, although I am having to reinstall apps and reconfigure a few settings here and there which takes time. But all my user data did come back.

At first though, I thought somehow I had wiped out/accidentally reformatted my time capsule. The reason being, partway through the time machine restore process, it failed, then when I rebooted and tried again in recovery mode, it didn't seem like it was showing anything on the time capsule to recover from. I eventually did a clean reinstall of Mojave (Made a bootable USB OS image.. although I actually has to start with High Sierra first and then upgrade, since the only Macs I have in the house are the 2011 variety that can't download Mojave).

Anyway, once I was back to clean Mojave and tried Migration assistant and still couldn't see anything on the time capsule, I just mounted the time capsule so I could see the data on it, and I noticed the backup had an extension .backupbundle instead of .sparsebundle. Renaming it back to .sparsebundle and retrying migration assistant did the trick:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3445481/can-t-find-your-time-machine-backup-after-upgrading-to-catalina-look-for-a-backupbundle.html

Oh and in my case, after reinstalling almost everything and being pretty much back up and running fully I find I have LOTS more disk space, so that was a win :) Sometimes a little housekeeping is useful, even when it causes a few days of pain....

Arshes .... Are you still stuck? The solution above worked for me, instantly.

"To turn of SIP, first you have to start your mac in recovery mode.

Then open the terminal and type

csrutil status

And if it confirms you that SIP is currently enabled on your system enter the command

csrutil disable

Restart and check if the problem persists.

Please do not forget to reenable SIP after apple has solved this issue in the next operation system update (hopefully) :)"

I could not agree more with you, Arshes, that disabling System Integrity Protection is not a good idea, but nothing else works at the moment and unfortunately Apple does not care less about users like us. I am sure a future update will solve the problem as it existed with Mojave at one point and was fixed with an update. There is a workaround, but it is a pain in the neck. After you start your Mac and before opening any apps you can move Xcode to another folder (with holding down the [command] key and dragging) and then moving it back to the Applications folder. It somehow bypasses the verification and your Mac is going to be working as usual with SIP until a restart.

You can if you have a time machine backup, but it’s a little messy. But do you need to? Sounds like this latest Catalina update is fixing it for everyone. If not and you still need to revert... and if you have a time machine backup, then there is a process, but you’ll have to rename the file extension for your time machine backup from backupbundle to sparsebundle. Googling with those words in the search term should get you the info you need.

Same here. At login it starts verifying apps at random and makes the Mac very slow and useless for minutes. Did anyone find a solution? Even with the last update 10.15 the problem remains.

Yes same for me - latest updates as of today, repeatedly Verifies chrome, dropbox photos and xcode post login..

I am having same issue. Repeatedly verifies Dropbox, MS Word & Excel, even iPhoto, amount others. Makes startup as slow as my old Windows PC! This started after upgrading to Catalina OS.

Nope, disabling csrutil did not fix the issue for me. Reverting to Mojave.