Thank you for your answer. Eskimo! Looking at your answer, it seems that the framework should be embeds on the app even though the framework is statically linked to the app, is it correct that I understand? If I understand correctly, it takes advantage of static linking, but I think the bundle size for the app will be bigger

After posting the question, I looked up the flag -no_merged_libraries_hook at the https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/ld.1.html page, and it seems that bundle lookup is performed on the merge binaries, not on the mergeable framework. But in order to actually use resources, I think we need to include resources in the merged binary itself.