What is the size of the framework?

At a first glance the framework's size might seem excessive with the ImglyKit.framework and PhotoEditorSDK.framework folder being over 150 MB in size and the complete uncompressed PhotoEditorSDK.zip file being over 230 MB in size. Due to the amount of features and assets it offers, PhotoEditor SDK naturally adds quite a few MB to your app's size. However the actual size that your users will get differs a lot from what the previously mentioned numbers might suggest. The following section explains what's included in the SDK and why it seems to be so large.

tl;dr In the average case PhotoEditor SDK will add around 25 MB to your app.

Architectures#

The binary file of PhotoEditor SDK includes slices for multiple architectures, namely x64 and arm64. The slices for x64 are only used during development when you run your app in the iPhone simulator. When submitting your app to the App Store those slices will be removed from the binary automatically if you're using Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods, or followed our manual integration guide. Since each slice is a complete copy of the SDK's compiled source code, this step alone removes around 50% from the SDK's binary.

The remaining 50% are made up of the arm64 slice, which also contains bitcode. Bitcode is a large, unoptimized, intermediate representation of a compiled binary. While you should in general upload the bitcode slices to Apple, your users will not have to download them when installing your app.

Bitcode#

Bitcode enables Apple to recompile your application on their servers, thus applying the best and latest compiler optimizations, without requiring you to resubmit or even maintain your app. Apple also uses bitcode to generate device specific, optimized versions of your app, so that your users only download what is actually necessary for their device. This process is called App Thinning and has been available since iOS 9.

The actual final download and install size for each specific device can be seen in App Store Connect, if you click on "App Store File Sizes" after you selected a build in the "Activity" tab.

If you do not want to include bitcode, you can remove bitcode from the compiled binary with the following command:

xcrun bitcode_strip -r ImglyKit -o ImglyKit
xcrun bitcode_strip -r PhotoEditorSDK -o PhotoEditorSDK

ImglyKit.bundle#

All assets that are shipped with the SDK, including shaders, fonts, stickers, frames and overlays, are contained within the ImglyKit.bundle. The size of all assets is optimized as much as possible, but the bundle is still around 15 MB in size. If you do not require all assets that we ship with the SDK, you can delete those resources from the ImglyKit.bundle folder. Please note that those changes might be undone with an update of the SDK though and the SDK might not work as expected if you delete too much.

dSYM and BCSymbolMaps#

The PhotoEditorSDK.zip file also contains dSYM files and BCSymbolMaps. These files are very large and needed for crash log symbolication, but they will not be part of your application.

GitHub#

Because GitHub has a maximum file size limit of 100 MB, the PhotoEditor SDK binary can't be pushed to a GitHub hosted repository. To get around this issue, we suggest the following solutions, ordered from most to least preferred:

1. Use Swift Package Manager or CocoaPods to integrate the SDK with the Pods folder added to your .gitignore. This way you don't commit the SDK to git, but engineers will have to run pod install before running the project.
2. Use GitHub LFS to commit the SDK.
3. Remove bitcode from the SDK's binary and commit the SDK.
4. (Advanced) Split the SDK's binary into multiple binaries for each architecture and combine them again as needed in a custom Build Phase.