Strange difference in size of unity game after installation.

My game ipa size is 341 MB, but when I install it on device this becomes 1.1GB which is strange. I know apple applies some type of encryption when we upload our app to appstore, but without uploading to appstore when I directly install my app on IPad with XCode it shows me 1.1 GB on IPad. I have read many docs to reduce the size of ipa but nothing happens. Also the size of installed game on Android and Windows mobile is around 360 MB, but IOS is taking a huge part of the memory after installation. I don't know whats going on the back side.
How unity works with IOS? Does unity needs more supporting code or libraries to run on IOS?

 

It's compressed when uploaded to the store (ipa is basically a zip file), and uncompressed when stored on the device. So it's not actually strange, but expected.

--Eric

 

Yea that's fine but why the installed application size over Android remains the same (i.e. 341MB). Important thing to note here is that the android binary before installation is also 341MB

 

I would assume that Android apps are still compressed on the device after installing, then.

--Eric

 

I get smaller sizes from Android builds than iOS builds, but never that extreme! For that ratio the build needs to be very small, otherwise it's more like a 20-30MB difference. Android and iOS needs roughly the same size of supporting files, but the binary (a little over 20MB of the app) is uncompressable on iOS after encryption.

Android got some of the newer texture compression formats before iOS, which Unity also supported for Android only until recently. I think you still won't get the latest ones without building with 5.0 betas, so that could account for the huge difference. Still seems a bit extreme to have about 700-800MB difference.

Unity's asset format is all LZMA compressed, so it should really be the same or similar on iOS also. The IPA doesn't really change the size of Unity apps much at all. Only signatures, a few plists and app icons/splash screens are extracted. I'd like to know what happened to that iPad version too

 

#Eric
No, Installed apps on Android are not compressed. They are all in the form which is ready to run.

 

Only for webplayer builds; standalones for example have no compression, aside from hardware texture formats (DXT) and audio (OGG). Find any .assets files from installed Unity games, and you can typically compress them down by a lot.

--Eric

 

Ah, that's right. Then I guess it's model data that makes up the bulk of the uncompressed data.

 

Model data is relatively insignificant; textures usually make up the bulk of the data, and hardware compression formats such as DXT can still be zip-compressed by quite a bit.

--Eric

 

Bah, stupid 90s texture formats

Not much to do for the iOS case then, other than waiting for newer Unity versions and releasing only for the latest devices. Which is still probably not a great idea.