Find an iOS simulator identifier
When running a device simulator on macOS, it is possible to navigate that system’s directly through the command line (or Finder, if you’d prefer). To do that, navigate to to the following directory:
cd /Library/Developer/CoreSimulator
If you look around in this directory, you will probably see a number of subdirectories with UUIDs. Each of these corresponds to a simulator device which contains all of the data for that instance. In order to browse a specific simulator’s files, you need to know its ID.
There are two ways to find that, one using the Xcode UI and another using the terminal.
Through Xcode
- In the top menu, select “Window” > “Devices and Simulators”
- You can use the shortcut shift+command+2.
- In the left menu of the new window, select the “Simulators” tab
- Select the device from the list below
- Note: Make sure you match the device specs and iOS version
- Look for “Identifier:” in the main panel and copy the value
Through the terminal
The following command require Xcode command-line tools, which you probably already have installed if you are running Xcode.
- From anywhere on your system, run
xcrun simctl list devices - Find the ID from the output by iOS version and device specs and copy the ID
If the device is already running, you can save yourself some time by passing a search argument:
# Show only running simulators
xcrun simctl list devices booted
That should surface the current simulator faster for copying.
Take a look around!
Once you have the simulator ID copied, you can navigate there in the terminal with:
cd /Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/SIMULATOR-ID-THAT-YOU-COPIED
For example, if you want to look into a specific app’s bundle, you can find that data within the simulator directory at ./data/Containers/Bundle/Application/APP-ID. I have found this useful when debugging image paths in the final app bundle.
Happy browsing!