I came across Macworld’s article on deleting iOS apps stored by iTunes a while back and promised myself I would look into it when I got home. I forgot about it for a few days, but then I remembered the other day when I had to temporarily copy a huge amount of data to my drive and didn’t have enough space.
The upside when this sort of thing happens is that I’m forced to clean out and delete a bunch of things that I know I’ll never want or need. But in this case, it still wasn’t enough. I still needed another 8GB of space. Then I remembered the article.
Turns out, I had 24GB of iOS apps backed up in iTunes that macOS, iOS or myself will never use. 24GB! I almost didn’t believe it. Needless to say, I dumped that folder like a bad habit.
If you don’t want to read the article, allow me to summarize:
- Navigate to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Mobile Applications
- Delete everything in that folder (those are all backup files of your iOS apps that you can never actually use)
- There is no step 3
Being paranoid I made a backup before deleting the folder, just in case things went south the next time I synced my iPhone with iTunes (which I don’t do very often). The next sync with iTunes went just fine, and that folder backup has since been deleted.
The more apps you have ever installed on your iPhone or iPad, the larger that folder is likely to be.