Breaking changes

Platform tools (SDK and simulator runtimes) will only be available for the three most recently installed versions of Xcode, including beta and pre-release versions for macOS-15-based and later images.

Target date

Image deployment will start on August 11th, 2025 and will take about 3 days

The motivation for the changes

Since the release of visionOS on macOS-14, we have been experiencing ongoing issues with disk space for macOS-based images. Xcode and its components take up the largest amount of space, with simulator runtimes being the most significant portion. The remaining components do not take up a significant portion of disk space, which rules out optimization by removing or reducing them. There is currently no technical possibility to expand the base disk. In this regard, we have decided to reduce support for the oldest versions of Xcode platform tools in favor of newer ones to facilitate the image update process and ensure the ability to add the upcoming releases of Xcode 26.1 and Xcode 26.2 on macOS-15.

Possible impact

If your workflow running on a macOS-15 based image and depends on one of the platform versions (iOS/watchOS/tvOS/visionOS) lower than Xcode 16.3 compatible, they will be broken.

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 24.04
• macOS 13
• macOS 13 Arm64
• macOS 14
• macOS 14 Arm64
• macOS 15
• macOS 15 Arm64
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022
• Windows Server 2025

Mitigation ways

If you see any issues with your workflows, you may do one of the next steps:

• install the required platform manually before running the dependent command using xcodebuild -downloadPlatform <iOS|watchOS|tvOS|visionOS>
• update the broken command and/or project to be compatible with the latest available release version of Xcode (Xcode 16.4 at the moment)
• switch your workflow to use a macOS-14 based image