Why is iOS app size 10x larger than Android?

Questions & Answers
1

I have a question that seems to have been asked many times in different forums but I never find a real answer.

I was downloading the example game for Unity with the aliens and “potato” dude with bazooka.
When building the Android version I get a APK file size of 13 MB but when building the iOS version its suddenly about 140 MB!

The Assets folder is no bigger than 10.7 MB but when building the Xcode project I get a file sharedassets0.assets which is 80 MB even though the sprites are set to be compressed. Compression seems to have no effect what so ever on sprites.

I don’t understand how it can be so large and I think Apple has an app limit of 100 MB so how does this work?
When zipping the app it gets down to 24MB. Is the app itself compressed when deploying?

Also an example of a sprite where the original png file is 70kb, Unity says it will take 1.7MB when its compressed. Strange…

Can someone help me understand this?

2

This question is old but it might help someone out there, apps on iOS are a lot larger than android:
Because the texture format is different and a lot heavier, to avoid this problem all textures most be Compressed to PVRTC format, a lighter and better quality format for iOS.

In order to be able to compress to PVRTC format your textures most be POT textures, this means, they most have equal width and height, and have width and height power of 2, example: 256 *256, 512 * 512 * 1024 * 1024.