Enabling Bitcode for iOS 9 increases IPA size 3x, is this the size on the app store?

Question

Before iOS 9, our IPA size was roughly 6MB. After Archiving and exporting our IPA through Xcode 7, our IPA increased to about 17MB. Upon further investigation, we found out that enabling the "Bitcode" option in the export settings is what caused the large filesize jump.

My question is this: if we enable this option, will our IPA size be 17MB in the store? Or does Apple do something with the bundle to make it roughly the same size as before (6MB).

There's not much info about Bitcode out there right now, and I'd like to be informed before submitting to the store. 6MB and 17MB is enough of a difference to be concerned.

Answer 1

Bitcode is an intermediate representation of a compiled program. Enabling it will increase the build (ipa) size on the developer front.

iOS can run on different CPUs (i386, x86_64, arm, arm64, etc.), if you want to run a program on any iOS setup, then the program should contain object code for each platform. When you run a program, OS reads the ‘Table Of Contents’ and looks for a slice corresponding to the OS CPU. For instance, if you run on x86_64, then OS will load object code for x86_64 into memory and run the program.

Currently, all the apps on the AppStore contain object code for arm and arm64 CPUs. Moreover, third-party proprietary libraries or frameworks contain object code for i386, x86_64, arm, and arm64, so you can use them to test the app on device and/or simulator.

How does the Bitcode works? When you submit an app (including Bitcode) Apple’s ‘BlackBox’ recompiles it for each supported platform and drops any ‘useless’ object code, so AppStore has a copy of the app for each CPU. When an end-user wants to install the app - she installs only the version for a particular processor, without any unused stuff.

Bitcode might save up to 50% of disk space per program.

Reference: http://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/