Is an iOS app larger if it supports more iOS version?

Question

If I have an app that supports only iOS 7 and above, will the App Store size of the app be less than the same app with support for iOS 6 and above? And that vs iOS 5 and above?

Answer 1

No, your app's size won't directly increase, because they are all built on top of the same base SDK.

Some things (among many others) that may increase the size are:

• additional libraries that you may need to add if you want an old version of iOS to mimic a new feature;
• or any additional code that you may need to grant compatibility with older versions;
• different image sizes for retina/4" compatibility;
• different nib files for different screen sizes;
• multiple architectures

Edit:

As Neal remembered, different architectures will increase the bundle size, and older devices have different architectures than newer devices. So in a certain point of view, yes, your app will probably be larger if you support from iOS 5 to iOS 7, for instance. But that really depends on which hardware to you want to support, which can indirectly increase the app size.

Answer 2

There are only two additional things that could increase your app size as result of supporting different iOS version.

• Extra code
• Assets

The additional code will only happen if you have specifically at a different code paths for the different iOS versions. The libraries that you're that you're using also be a culprit.

For assets, you will need additional images for the icon and for this launch screens. These can be significant. By optimizing these images one of my apps hazard just from 20 MB 23 MB.

I would recommend ImageOptim to address this issue.

http://imageoptim.com/