How to Download Old Versions of Xcode

Most of the time, we just need the most up-to-date version of Xcode from the App Store. But occasionally we need an older version. So... how do you get past versions of Xcode?

Whyyy would I need an old version of Xcode?

Valid question – it’s not often you’ll need one. Two reasons off the top of my head though:

1) To compare with your previous experience

Perhaps you’re just wanting to see what things “used to be like”.

Maybe you’re struggling with the infamous “this code worked before…now it doesn’t…what changed?” and you just want to build your project with a prior version of Xcode in order to rule it out as the culprit.

Grabbing an older version of Xcode could help you here.

2) To upgrade a very old project to newer versions of Swift

I hit this one the other day. I needed to update the exercise files for my Core Data Fundamentals with Swift course on Pluralsight.

I opened the project in Xcode 12 and this popped up:

Xcode 10.1??? That was a while ago. 😅

How to download

Regardless of your reason, the good news is that you can download old versions of Xcode (and a lot of other tools) from the Apple Developer Center.

The link is a bit hidden though, so I’ll leave it here for you as an easy-to-find breadcrumb:

You’ll need to sign in to your Apple Developer account, but once you’re in, you’ll have access to lots of old stuff.

Every version of Xcode is available – all the way back to version 1.0, released in 2003.

You’ll also find prior versions of macOS, old versions of the command line tools, prior betas and release candidates of Xcode and macOS, and more.

How cool is that?