What's the huge Built-in Texture2D without name in my build?

Questions & Answers
1

In my iOS and Android builds, I see this huge Built-in Texture2D in the editor log without a name. It takes 33.4% of my entire build. I can’t figure out what this is, so I don’t know how to reduce its size. Here’s a sample of my editor log:

Used Assets and files from the Resources folder, sorted by uncompressed size:
 16.0 mb	 33.4% Built-in Texture2D: 
 5.3 mb	 11.2% Assets/SpriteSheets/MainSpriteSheet.png
 ...

How can I find out what this Built-in Texture2D is?

2

Turns out it’s the background image in the Splash Screen section. Which is weird, since I use the same background in the game, and it’s already shown in the editor log with a size of 2 MB. If using the same image as background for the Splash Screen increases the size of the build by this much, it’s pretty pointless for us to use this Splash Screen functionality and just create our own.

3

Just to add up to this. There’s currently a bug in Unity that if you assign a Background Splash, and after you uncheck the “Show Splash Screen” because you want to use Storyboard (on iOS), Unity will still export the asset to the build and even load it in memory without freeing it.

I just lost so much time with this, trying to find what was that Texture2D…

4

I’m developing a WebGL app, and I have the same problem, I came to the following solution:

  • Duplicate splash sprite and use second one just for unity preloader.
  • Change sprite Max Size to 512/256 (or lower) and disable any compression (I figured out that compression doesn’t work for unity preloader background at all)
  • Use Blur Background Image toggle in Project settings → Splash Image section

As a result, we have a low-quality background, which is leveled by the blur feature.
I don’t encourage you to use my solution, but so far this is the only thing I’ve come up with)