Tip: Clean up your AppStore folder

Wondering where all of your disk space has gone since the AppStore launched? Check your home folder!

If you navigate to your 'Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications' folder, you will find all of your downloaded AppStore purchases. What you will also find is that there are multiple copies of these files; the reason being that when you update an app, instead of simply being replaced on your hard drive, it is instead given a new name. Usually this is a numeric value appended to the end of the filename, for instance, a new version of 'casino.ipa' becomes 'casino 1.ipa'.

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There are probably numerous good reasons for Apple to make this behavior the default, the most likely being the need to recover from a bad or corrupt download. But unfortunately it takes up space and one can't help but to presume that it makes iTunes lag a bit when it is parsing your application information. For some applications with a lot of graphics or embedded content the disk consumption can be quite hefty.

So, if you'd like to clean your drive and possibly speed up iTunes, try the following. Remember, try this at your own risk - it worked for me, but your mileage may vary.

  • Navigate to your 'Home/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications' folder. For comparison purposes, do a 'Get Info' on the folder to see how large it is - mine was 1.58gb before I started cleaning it and a mere 1.1gb afterwards.
  • Sort the files by name. You should now see the filename changes mentioned above.
  • Begin removing any duplicates that exist...you should out them in the Trash for a while in case of any problems. You should be removing the duplicates with the lowest incremented value. For instance, if you have 4 variations of a file - casino 1.ipa, casino 2.ipa, casino 3.ipa, and casino 4.ipa - leave only casino 4.ipa, as it will be the latest version.
  • After verifying that your apps are still synching properly via iTunes, empty your Trash to discard the wasted dupes.

The process may be a little time-consuming, but if you're a neat freak you'll find the exercise well worth the effort. Perhaps some enterprising soul out there will come up with a quick and easy AppleScript to automate the process in the near future.

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