Develop on latest iOS without upgrading your Xcode

Here provides a way to develop on latest iOS without upgrading your Xcode

Develop on latest iOS without upgrading your Xcode

I just simply just wanna use the Unlock by Apple Watch feature that iOS 14.5 Developer Beta 1 offers so I upgraded. But nearly instantly after that Xcode on my Mac (specifically Xcode 12.3) starts to complain about itself not supporting the new iOS, something like

Could not locate device support files.
This iPhone X (Model A1865, A1901, A1902, A1903) is running iOS 11.1 (15B93), which may not be supported by this version of Xcode.

I don't wanna upgrade Xcode since it takes, for just downloading, 11.0 GB, and according to my experiences and also posts online it may require up to 40 GB of disk space in order to be installed correctly. A big NO on my 240 GB MacBook :(


After some digging I found this awesome solution:

  1. Go to either one of those GitHub repositories and find the iOS version you intended to add support on your current Xcode installation: iGhibli/iOS-DeviceSupport, or filsv/iPhoneOSDeviceSupport.

    • A lot of posts mentioned the latter one but not the former one, and at the time I write this post the latter one still lacks DeviceSupport files for iOS 14.5 that I do found in the former repo.
  2. Go to the following path: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/, extract the package you've downloaded and populate it into the directory above.

  3. Restart Xcode and enjoy! :D

Credits

  1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61863826/iphone-is-not-available-please-reconnect-the-device
  2. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47119186/how-to-fix-xcode-error-could-not-locate-device-support-files-on-iphone-with-xco