IOS build size is larger than it should be

I did some google search but haven't found a specific answer for this. Here you can see that a project with only 2 sprites in it is supposed to be 4.8MB:



The unity project itself: 114
The Xcode build(from unity): 809
The IPA file: 137
The app on my iPhone (through Xcode): 38.2

If I understand correctly the combined sizes of all the files in my project are 4.8, so I would like to know how a 4.8 project turned out to be 38.2 on my phone? And is there a way to make those sizes much less and more representative of the actual project size, especially the IPA file which is the one that gets uploaded to the Appstore.
Also, I'd like to know given the above data, what is the size of the file that gets uploaded to the Cloud build.

 

@christophergoy
Thanks for the reply.
I checked all the links you provided and it seems that the entire problem is down to the "Bitcode" being enabled by default. I added the script to my project and indeed it made a difference although not very huge when it came to the size of the app on the phone which is now (21.9 MB) and still larger than it should be. I have the same project made with Corona SDK and it's 4.8 MB on my phone.

The exported Xcode project is 710 MB, which is huge, so I checked and found a file called "libiPhone-lib.a" that alone is 603 MB. it's under a folder called "Libraries":
"Xcode-Project/Libraries/libiPhone-lib.a"
I'm not sure what this file is and if I should just delete it, and if I can, why is it in there by default? and if I can't, again, why?

I understand that "Bitcode" allows Apple to optimize the app later to support different screen sizes or ios versions and I would like to know if disabling it is the right way to go, and is there any other way to enable it but keep the project & app sizes reasonably small. I also would like to know why aren't this option is available in "Player Settings".

Apologies for the long post and that many questions that I have, but it just that a year ago I tried "unity3d" and despite it being a very great and fast engine for developing games, I faced several issues with it when it came to publishing the project. Now I'm back to it and it seems that most issues are still there.
So, I was wondering are the engineers behind "unity3d" aware of those issues and working on making it much simpler better, and more efficient than it is?

Not to make comparisons, but one thing I loved about Corona SDK is that you can build and upload an IOS app without even having to open Xcode, and the projects there have much more logical sizes.

Thank you.

 

@christophergoy
Thank you again, Christopher, for taking the time to answer me.

I strongly recommend that the team at unity give more attention to this issue, as you know, sometimes the only way to properly test your project is by using an actual phone, sometimes it needs to be done 5 or 6 times in a matter of minutes when you are tweaking some values, but with the current setup where we have to wait for unity to build a huge file, then Xcode to again, build and archive that file it's a very tedious, slow and painful process.
Please, explore that matter and try to make it much easier and faster in the future.

 

@christophergoy please don't do that
you'll introduce another dependency on rather fragile apple dev stack where app uploader can be updated / changed any time without notice
exposing Xcode project parameter/s is rather sufficient way to customize Xcode project - everything else down the road I'd leave to whatever the current Apple way of doing thing is.

( just to be clear: I'm talking just about the uploading application directly from unity )

 

Can anybody help me? This seems to be a major disparity .... why is it so huge after installation?