Can I install Xcode on an external hard drive along with the iPhone Simulator.app?

Question

I want to install xcode to deploy a cross platform flutter application but I cant find enough space for Xcode is there any alternative solutions to just installing it on the

Answer 1

As an alternative to just moving XCode to an external drive you could also clone your mac disc and move the whole operating system onto your external drive and make it bootable.

Things you need:

• A large, fast external SSD, such as the Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 drive.
• A Mac disk cloner (e.g. Carbon Copy Cloner beta for Big Sur, or SuperDuper!)

Install the cloning software, follow the instructions and you'll have a bootable external drive in less than an hour (depending on what you are cloning)

You now have a portable development disk which can be plugged in and booted from any modern mac (caveat, not actually tried this)

On first boot and usage of XCode, the Apple OS will perform some verification of apps, but once that is done you should be fine.

I have a 2018 mac-mini running Big Sur with only 128GB internal SSD. Every time I needed to upgrade XCode I had to delete all the simulators. Upgrading to Big Sur was even harder :-/

Performance?

The external drive (Samsung T5) is 3x quicker to write to than the cheap internal SSD that Apple use on the mac-mini. Read speeds are about the same according to BlackMagic. Overall, Flutter app builds on the external drive are about 10% quicker.