Just try to create an empty single page application in Xcode 8, archive and make ipa (export to the App Store deployment).
The size of the ipa-file is ~55MB. The project is really empty, only files automatically generated by the Xcode.
Is there any way to decrease the size of the ipa-file? Is there any magic in the project settings?
Regards,
Pavel
The size of an IPA file generated by Xcode is not representative of the size of an app downloaded or installed on a device from the App Store - think of it as the sum of everything needed to support all devices, but no device needs everything in the IPA. You shouldn't be concerned about the size of this file.
If you're concerned about the download or the install size of your app, you can export your archive from Xcode as an Ad-Hoc build to see the size of device-specific IPAs, similar to the IPAs the App Store generates from the original IPA. When exporting as an Ad-Hoc build, have Xcode export variants for each compatible device, and to recompile the bitcode, you'll find the resulting IPAs for the basic Xcode template you tried are between 1 and 4MB each, compressed.
About size increases:
Technical Q&A QA1795: Reducing the size of my App
And for additional reference should it come up:
