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android to ios

kirankannan8

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Nov 13, 2016
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I have just spent the last day or so trying to track this exact problem down. I have built a little game called BlockIT for Android, and now I have a running version for IOS. The extremely odd thing is that the Android version is 8.2 MB and the IOS version is 14.1 MB.

Now, since I am the owner of the source, I wanted to track this down and find out why. As many suggest here that it is the graphical elements - this is not the case. The entire data set (non code) was almost identical in each package. Which makes sense since I am using the same graphics in each application.

So, why is the code build so much different! My IOS code build was nearly 7 MB and the Android one was less than 3 MB. The code itself was written to run identically and all but small portions of code are exactly the same on each platform. What I found was that the build (IOS gcc) settings had massive effects on what size of output you get. If you set only to target ARM6 or ARM7 then the size of my code binary dropped from 7 MB to 5 MB. This indicates there are almost complete duplicates of functions and libraries for each target in the one binary! Additionally, the built-in debugging symbols dont seem to get entirely stripped. Finally, the encryption of the code also costs large amounts. This is probably the most puzzling, since Android signs their apk's in a similar fashion. It seems that the IOS signing is done very oddly.

So, I hope that helps.

Source:App file size differences in Android and iOS - Stack Overflow
 

Rob Phillips

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We are mostly phone app users, not builders here! But some ambassador maybe able to shed some light on the issue.

The problem here is that the answer to the question is highly technical. The previous response explains it quite well and in detail. At the end of the day, iOS games are generally larger because of the way data is encoded and compressed. Furthermore, most apps are written universally so they tend to include larger amounts of graphics and artwork to support the larger screen resolutions of the iPad lineup.
 

TwitchyPuppy

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Because Android OS takes so much space and requires so much RAM to run so apps have to be as compressed as possible!

Hence why iOS is the ultimate OS

(Honestly, I have no idea but Rob's answer makes sense).
 

Damien_Eternal

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Its possible that it may also have to do with including different libraries for each platform. Even if the underlying hardware is the same, the OS they run can make a difference here. The way each operates and interfaces with the hardware can change what is needed to work.
 

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