Huge iOS Build Size

Hello, I have attached the screenshot of the assets used in Unity build.




As you can see size is 34 MB only but when I export as an ipa from Xcode, the size gets to 230 MB.

Why is that? From where is this extra 200 MB coming from? How to remove it?

I have bitcode enabled and I am using Xcode 7.3.1.

 

During build I unchecked both "include app symbols" and "include bitcode" and size was drastically reduced to 30.9 MB.

 

The build report you see from Unity is only showing partial data.

Aside from these assets, the final build includes Unity's libraries, which may actually be included twice on iOS (if you're targetting both 32 and 64 bit systems).

 

The extra bits you get with app symbols checked is the DSYM file, which can be many times your app in size, and it's used to create logs you can check in iTunes Connect (apple get crashlogs from users, use the DSYM to make sense of them and present logs to you). You probably should enable it, since it may help you find bugs as reports are generated. It's not included in the final app a user downloads.

BitCode is required for tvOS and watchOS, but highly recommended on iOS. It probably won't contribute massively to the size of the package you upload, but it definitely shrinks again when distributed. Future downloads may be even smaller without you needing to upload anything, thanks to compiler improvements. It's an essential part of app thinning.