Reducing the Size of Your App

Apple has a Q&A article about the various ways to reduce the size of your application. Most noticeable is the Fastest, Smallest [-Os] optimization level and enabling Strip Debug Symbols During Copy.

We recommend using ImageOptim to reduce the size of your images. Applications like Adobe Photoshop save a lot of additional metadata in file formats such as PNG, and ImageOptim is very good for both removing such metadata and reducing image size by up to 90 percent. There’s an interesting case study detailing how using ImageOptim halved the size of Tweetbot.

We recommend archiving your app and then inspecting the final .ipa file. Sometimes files that should not be in the application end up there, and a simple check can find files that have accidentally been copied for release.

You can view the .ipa file contents sorted by compressed size using the following:

zipinfo -l path/to/app.ipa | sort -nr -k 6

This allows you to quickly identify which files take up the most space in the compressed .ipa file.