I have indie but understand that when developing with Pro there are elements that can be omitted from the final build in order to reduce the download size of the app.
Is this correct and if so what is possible using Pro to reduce the app size?
thanks
I believe this is only the case for iphone pro. (here you can remove networking/physics libraries etc.)
Thats what imparare meant,
I’m very confused.
Even the most simple games apear on appstore being 15MB or so.
Like FUGUTILT.
15 MB for a game with as far as I see 1 texture for the plate, 1 backdrop and no sound.
I think I’m going to create a small free game and test what it gives. Cannot believe that this takes so much space after UT said that a basic app project is 6MB + assets and scripts.
That would mean this app would have 9MB of assets
I’d guess that some files are encrypted within the distribution version and the compression does not work as well with the more random byte patterns of encrypted files.
I have a basic app. 1 level, 1 texture and 1 mesh with 1 small script.
If I go into the build folder and look at the .app file its 21Mb (the file with the circle and line thru it).
I could be looking at the wrong file here but how can that be 21Mb ?
created blank project and placed it onto the iPhone. Nothing at all in the project (except the default camera). App size == 20.2MB ??
Try to compress the .app and see how big the ZIP file is.
Normally its the ZIP file which counts
I understood that the zip is not relevant as Apple advertise it as uncompressed ?
5.8MB compressed. Which is the figure that has been quoted (6MB) as the ‘add ons’
the ‘click once buy now iphone browser ppl wont touch it at this size’
Pretty strange assumption, given that apples power is 132mb and on the top list since its release
if you want ultra small executables, you have to use xcode and code it yourself. If you use a fully fledged scripting + game engine, expect them to take up a serious amount of space.
the size of the app you are getting is from scripting. Just that you forget that all your scripts get compiled and then put in together with the whole mono lib which must be compiled in as well.
@dreamora - agreed a strange assumption.
The original question though was is there a benefit to using pro in order to reduce this size and if so what can pro do that indie cannot and what kind of difference will it make to the final file size?
iPhone users can only download files that are less than 10MB zipped. So maybe not so strange an assumption any more given that you are starting with 6MB before you have even done anything.
With iPhone Advanced you can enable the stripping.
So lets say you don’t use physics, then unity kicks that whole part in the AOT step.
We’ve tested that weeks ago on the chat, it results in nearly 50% cut down sizes just enable stripping but I don’t know what has been used.
One of the devs would had to answer what stripping can cut and what not. I would expect that it is able to strip unity engine related things but also whole Mono namespaces not used.
Thanks.
Would be nice if a Dev gave out some tech info on this.
Bytecode stripping removes all unused script bytecode before AOT compiling it. Usually scripts in Unity use only fraction of all .NET libraries, so it can be a huge win. On top of that we have micro mscorlib.dll, which is an size optimized version of core .NET library (reduced to ~0.6MB instead of standard ~2.1MB of CLR bytecode).
Afterwords it’s a work for XCode linker to strip unused code from the executable.
We have plans on more hardcode stripping in the future, where you could define explicitly what modules of the engine you need in the final application.
thank you for the answer ReJ
Sound like superb features and such an indepth answer on the topic is surely welcome. At least it is too me.
Thanks but a bit unclear on whats being said here.
Is that for both indie and pro and is that what is happening for this current build ?
thanks again
The stripping is only Unity iPhone Advanced
Unity iPhone Indie has no such mechanisms as you see on the iPhone feature page.
Thanks Dreamora, makes sense.
Now I will have to start a thread about the unfairness of having to buy pro unity before being able to purchase pro unity iphone 
Has anyone figured out whether the iPhone cellular downloads are allowed/disallowed based on the actual zipped size or the size reported in the App store?
10MB Zipped/compressed
It’s based on the size reported by the app store.
does not make a difference anyway. in most cases the downloads trash themself anyway through cellular and that even here in Switzerland where we have one of the strongest UMTS tech grade.
I only go for downloads on wifi / on my mac