Making project smaller

Are there any extra frameworks in there? Make sure you are really deleting and removing assets too by the way. If you remove a file, your size should go down. Make sure you do a clean and then a build.

 

I suspect we need a little more information on what is using the space to help you on this but you could try:

Look for files that aren't loaded, I know I have a few in my current app that I'll need to clean up before I submit it.

If you are using a lot of texture, try compressing (some of) them. For example, compressing a single 1024x1024 from 32bit to 4bit compressed could save all the space you need and more.

Maybe you have a lot of large level files or similar that could be compressed through a simple RLE algorithm or, if you need more than that, you might want to look into a zip library like this: http://www.winimage.com/zLibDll/minizip.html Note that I have no idea if that lib is any good or easy to use but I saw it mentioned on the official dev forums recently.

 

As GamerOutfit said, you need to make sure you really deleted your sound files. Especially since you said there was no change when removing them. There should at least be a little change. And as pretty much everyone has said, remove what you don't need.

With the textures, bit reduction is a great way to save a lot of space. Don't, however, underestimate the power of using assets that are either 16bit (RGBA 5551) or even palettized data. Of course 4-bit gets you huge gains, but if supporting 4-bit degrades the quality of the image too much, those other lower bit-depth formats work great.

Also remember that the download size will be the size of your application after you ZIP it for submission. Not the .app size you see after the build. Ours before the ZIP was around 24MB and zipped down to 5.4MB.

 

I hadn't realised that. Thanks for pointing it out though as my app goes from 10.7 to 7.4 megs when I zip it. One less thing on my todo list

 

Just note as well that, after you submit the program to Apple, the size of the application on the iTunes Store tends to be a little bit bigger than the .zip you submit, although I think it is usually less than a megabyte difference, so if you are at 7.4 MB, you won't need to worry.

 

Youch! Good to know. We've only submitted one app to date, which happened to have the same download size as our ZIP.

With that good warning issued, everyone else should also remember that the more you pre-compress, the less benefits you will have on the ZIP as well as the Apple compression for the download to the device.