Are Xamarin iOS apps bloated unreasonably?

Question

I\'m developing a reasonably simple app using Xamarin iOS and the smallest size I\'ve gotten for the .app file is 13.5 MB.

I\'ve performed all the recommended optim

Answer 1

Xamarin apps are a bit larger in release mode, as one would expect. As an example, looking at my binaries from two shipping apps, the binary + dlls are around 12m and 18m (I think I need to look into why the 18m one is so much bigger...). I would guess if I had done these in objective-c they would have been around half that size, from past experience building native apps.

If you're running debug hardware builds, they are enormous. the 12m example above jumps up to 96M (?!) for binary + dlls. Before I checked this, I had in my head that they doubled in size to deal with software debugger, but I guess there's a whole lot of other crap going in that I wasn't aware of.