This morning, I went to iTunes to check and see if I had any app updates. While I see the updates on my iOS devices, and download new versions, I don’t often check iTunes for updates to apps that I don’t use. Since I review a lot of apps, I have several hundred iOS apps, which I keep around, just in case.
Then I got to wondering how much space all these apps were taking up on my Mac. I looked at my Mobile Applications folder (in the iTunes Media folder), and found it was a whopping 30 GB. I looked inside, curious that I had that many apps, and found a number of duplicates.
As you can see above, there are some apps that are actual duplicates of the same files – Angry Birds 1.5.3 1.ipa is a duplicate of Angry Birds 1.5.3.ipa – but there are also older versions of apps, which should have been deleted during updates. For example, there are three versions of 1Password, and two versions of Angry Birds 5 (Angry Birds 5.0.0.ipa and Angry Birds 5.0.1.ipa). iTunes should have deleted all of these when updating apps.
So, I went through the folder and deleted all the duplicate apps. I deleted about 2 GB worth of dupes, which isn’t a lot compared to the total size of the folder, but it’s still 2 GB gained. Some of the duplicate apps were quite large, such as the 352 MB Numbers. You may have other large apps that take up space.
So take some time to check this folder and see if you have duplicates. You might save a fair amount of space too.