Is there any iOS app size inspection tool? - ios

Question

I am working with an iOS app which uses both objective-c and swift code. Currently app IPA size became large. Some resources are included but may not be used in Release IPA. I want to find out which resource should be removed and which resource are making my app size increased unnecessarily. I wonder if there is any such tool or xcode profiler to analyze.

Answer 1

So far the best tool I found is https://github.com/tinymind/LSUnusedResources
LSUnusedResources
A Mac App to find unused images and resources in an XCode project. It is heavily influenced by jeffhodnett‘s Unused, but Unused is very slow, and the results are not entirely correct. So It made some performance optimization, the search speed is more faster than Unused.
Export unused resource list
Use this tool and export unused/unreferenced resource list into unused.txt
Remove references from Xcode .pbxproj file
Use the below python script to delete references from project.pbxproj file:
file = open("unused.txt","r")
data = [line.rstrip('\n') for line in open("project.pbxproj", 'r')]
newFile = open("project2.pbxproj","w")
def removeLine(imageName):
temp = data
for line_s in temp:
if line_s.find(imageName) != -1:
data.remove(line_s)
else:
continue
for line in file:
if (len(line) > 5):
tokens = line.split("/")
len_a = len(tokens)
imageName = tokens[len_a-1]
removeLine(imageName.rstrip('\n'))
for line in data:
newFile.write(line)
newFile.write('\n')
And an alternative script, in bash:
#!/bin/bash
UNUSED_ASSETS_FILENAME="unused-images.txt"
XCODEPROJ_PATH="zilly.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj"
while read LINE; do
FILENAME="$(basename "$LINE")"
if [[ $FILENAME =~ (png|jpeg|jpg|gif)$ ]]; then
echo "Removing '$FILENAME' references from $XCODEPROJ_PATH"
sed -i '' "/$FILENAME/d" $XCODEPROJ_PATH
fi
done < $UNUSED_ASSETS_FILENAME

Answer 2

First of all, are you using the latest Xcode version? Xcode 8.3 produces binaries 2-3 times larger than Xcode 8.2, and Apple fixed this bug in 8.3.1.
Also, you can check out On Demand Resources, which will let you upload your heavy assets to App Store, but not bundled within the app - and when the user will download your app, iOS will automatically download necessary assets for properly running the app.
You can change the .ipa file to have the .zip extension and unpack it. You later on can use simple inspection (Disk Inventory X for instance) of the unarchived .zip file and
see what's going on there.
Also, it is probable that you're looking at a App Store Submission .ipa, which will contain necessary dSYM files and other miscellaneous data.
You can check what App Store .ipa sizes for different devices the app will have by following steps in this answer.
And last but not least, check out this Q&A by Apple on reducing the size of your app.

Answer 3

Recommend an effective tool to analysis App Size:
WBBlades
Advantages:
Directly measure the size of .a or .framework after linking, no need to compile again and again.
Clearly show the differences between two versions,helping you to control the increasing size.
Effectively detect unused Code (ObjC & Swift)
Widely used in apps of Wuba inc.