Xcode 12.3

Oh no, another massive download and ages to update... :( And I only updated to 12.2 a few days ago. Why can't Apple do some sort of delta update for Xcode? Is there a technical reason? Or /is/ this the delta update?!

I don't really pay attention to the download size but I'm pretty sure Visual Studio Pro updates are around 1.5GB -- and I know for sure they apply far faster...

Why can’t Apple do some sort of delta update for Xcode? Is there a technical reason? Or /is/ this the delta update?!

I’m actually curious of the App Store delivers delate updates. I know at one point, the iOS App Store was supposed to add that feature. Did the Mac App Store ever gain it, though?

But the manual downloads, infamously in the xip file format, aren’t delta. One nice benefit to this is easy side-by-side installations. (I actually blew a colleague’s mind when I showed them they can simply drag an Xcode beta to a different path and launch it from there. Or rename it. They’re a Windows user.)

But the big drawback, yes, is that the actual delta is likely a low percentage.

I don’t really pay attention to the download size but I’m pretty sure Visual Studio Pro updates are around 1.5GB — and I know for sure they apply far faster…

While Windows Installer has a notion of delta updates, I believe VS doesn’t use them. However, VS is more modular, and if only some components (of which it has several dozens) need updating, that will save a lot of download and installation time. Xcode, instead, is fairly monolithic. There are the satellite components (and, say, the downloadable additional simulators), but for the most part, it’s all within the app bundle. That makes things simple, but also inefficient.

Given how much I see this complaint (of xip extraction being slow due to signature checks), and how not everyone has a Gigabit connection straight to Cupertino, it might be nice if Apple could provide delta updates.

Heck, I wonder if a third party could? Take the existing bundle, the new bundle, compare them into one massive binary patch, and host that. In practice, of course, there’s copyright and malware/trust considerations.

I guess Visual Studio doesn't contain 3 extra operating systems. The iOS/tvOS/watchOS folders make up more than 75% of the Xcode app.

As a Mac developer who will never touch them, I wish Apple would figure out how to modularize Xcode on that axis. Or get "Optimized Storage" to offload them. Having just 2 copies of Xcode (current, beta) means I'm wasting nearly 10% of my SSD on storing data I won't ever use.