Why Does XCode take so long to update

Complaining about the bloated Xcode here is pointless because we are all fellow users that cannot fix its issues of size, download, or installation time. The Xcode product team neither reads nor participates in these user-supported public communities.

It's bad enough that in its compressed state, it is as large as Monterey, and its sheer size exposes it longer to all of the Internet propagation delays that extend its download time. It does not matter what your current CPU or storage subsystem performance promises as it will take its sweet time installing countless subdirectories and files that exceed 36GB of storage.

If one does not need Xcode, but just a compilation suite, then the following command (included in the OS) in the Terminal will just install the compatible command-line tools for your operating system version which are under 3GB and measured in a few minutes:

xcode-select --install



It is indeed atrocious.

Pro Tip: if you want to see the actual progress of the down load and installation from the app store,

open "console" -> start recording -> [in the search type] "app store".

you should see something similar to this

default	16:37:34.491389+0100	App Store	ASDAppQuery.resultsDidChange 497799835: <NSProgress: 0x600000e18d20> : Parent: 0x0 (portion: 0) / Fraction completed: 0.9300 / Completed: 930 of 1000

¿Are you using an Apple-Silicon M1 Mac?

That compute-intensive step could be pre-converting older x86 modules to M1 code, typically done at first run. For Xcode, it could deliberately be done at Install Time instead

Xcode is HUGE and updating it requires the re-writing of thousands of files.

Hi,

Xcode is quite large system, so it depends on your Internet connectivity.

I just sent feedback to Apple on this very issue. This behavior is truly atrocious when it is occurring even on fast, modern machines with SSDs. It used to be far quicker on slower machines with HDDs. Please send feedback, if they don't hear complaints they'll just think everyone leaves their computers on all night every night to collect updates and that no one cares.

To me it seems this got considerably worse since the upgrade to Xcode 13.0, and since then for every 13.x upgrade step. That coincides with me upgrading to Monterey, so theoretically it might also be related to that. Xcode upgrade was never quick, but now it takes something like 5 hours here (2020 i7 Macbook Pro). Most of the time it's "stuck" at the end of the installation, as if it does some last extremely costly installation step (optimizing simulator images or whatever).

"Complaining about the bloated Xcode here is pointless .." Not so! First of all I posted to encourage others to send feedback to Apple. If one additional person besides myself sends in a Feedback report, then we will be further than before. Secondly, users can help each other, for example your information about `xcode-select --install` was new to me and may prove useful some time if I just need to build something on a temporary machine. Thanks for that!

Yeah I hate how long it is updating. I am not sure if disabling sleep and plugging it into power helps with it at all. When you have a newborn, and she just went to sleep and you want to do some programming, having it updating can be infuriating. Also realize that AppCode wont work either when Xcode is in the middle of an update.

I am just on an M1 16gb. But I guess its the same for even the more powerful computers. Was wondering if the new Studio would be more helpful with that. Guess not!

Worst developer nightmare is updating xcode. Every ios update is a nightmare. I'm still waiting for xcode to update for hours. On a 64GB i9 Macbook Pro!

Absolutely this is a problem. There is no way this should take this long, just no way. The download was fast, but the "install" is hitting 2 hours now...This is on a brand new mac mini.

No, it's Intel i7 (2,3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 32 GB RAM)