Engineering

How to install iOS 17 simulators in Xcode 15

A quick video tutorial

Note: Since the publishing of this post, official Apple docs have been published on this topic, which also offer instructions on using xcrun simctl runtime add from the command line to install simulator runtimes, which may save you some time.

TL;DR:

xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode-beta.app
xcodebuild -runFirstLaunch
xcrun simctl runtime add "~/Downloads/ios_17_beta_simulator_runtime.dmg"

If you’re like me and download new Xcode versions from the developer portal, you may have run into trouble this time around. Xcode 15 comes in multiple parts: Xcode itself and the simulators you want to install. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to install those simulators.

After a lot of googling, I finally found an answer in the developer forums that worked for me, so I put together a quick video to help other people out.

  1. Right click on the Xcode 15 Beta application and select Show Package Content.

  2. Double click to open the iOS_17_beta_Simulator_Runtime.dmg file

  3. Inside the simulator dmg file, find the Runtime folder. This is the folder we are going to copy into Xcode.

  4. Place the Runtime folder at Developer → Platforms → iPhoneOS.platform → Library → Developer → CoreSimulator → Profiles inside the Xcode 15 beta Show Package Contents

  • If you move the Xcode-beta application to the Application folder, you can use Finder to go to /Applications/Xcode-beta.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Profiles.
  1. Restart Xcode if you already have it open, and your iOS simulators will be there

And just like that, your simulators are installed.

If you want, you can also redownload the simulators through Xcode instead of doing this — but I found it failed a lot. Hopefully, this will all get smoothed out once everyone isn’t trying to download everything at the same time. 😅