Useful methods to reduce iphone app binary size

Question

How to reduce app binary size to fit the requirement of apple app store? Any useful method available?

We have tried the following methods.

1. Produce 16 bytes thumb instruction instead of original 32 bytes.
2. Using LLVM + XCode 4.2 to build the project.

Still large, hey, you smart guys, any idea or tips please share and discuss, thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Do you mean the binary or the whole .app? If the whole .app then consider your graphics assets - perhaps you actually need all of them? If you mean just the actual binary then you should check that for your release build configuration that the optimisation settings are set to Os which is optimise for size. Aside from that there's not much you can do apart from, well, write less code! I highly doubt it's your code that's taking up most of the space in the .app though, so you should probably start at looking at resources that you're adding to your project.

Answer 2

Usually, the biggest culprit for large file sizes are PNG files. ImageOptim and PNGOUT work great. See here.

Someone should really write a Mac App that grabs the outputted zip file for App Store, goes through the bundle and compresses all those images…