Did Apple change their app archiving method?

Question

We've been fighting to get our app under 20 MB so that over-the-air downloading would work, and with our last release 2 weeks ago we succeeded.

It took a bunch of trial-and-error to get right, but eventually we cut our app down to 27MB (uncompressed), which showed up in the store as 19.5MB.

All seemed well, until we did a minor code update to fix some bugs, when suddenly the app store version of the app ballooned to the full uncompressed 27MB size! I just checked the distribution archives, and the newer binary is actually 2k smaller than the older one.

Does anyone have any idea what would cause this?

Answer 1

In http://www.alexcurylo.com/blog/2010/05/22/tip-shipping-app-size/ there is a way to calculate the final size. In short:

• open the .app bundle via right-click -> Show Package Contents (on Mac)
• locate the executable file and remember its (uncompressed) size (Size “A”)
• delete the executable from the bundle
• zip the bundle and remember the bundle’s compressed size (Size “B”)
• Size “C” are the 100 KB from the additional files added to the bundle by Apple.

The final calculation for the maximum size of your App is as follows:

A + B + C = maximum size of your App after approval

in words:

(uncompressed executable size) + (app bundle compressed but without executable) + 0,1 MB = maximum size of your App after approval