Is it possible to remove the 3 1024x1024 app icon pngs from assets catalog for apps with Icon Composer app icons?

Question

Created 14h

Replies 3

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I am trying to slim my app as much as possible, as it really has no assets and I'm trying to be as apple native as possible, and it seems like 2.8MB out of my 4.5MB (on disk) app is because of the assets.car containing pre-rendered app icon images, which seems wasteful to bundle into the app

I ran assetutil -I Assets.car > assets.json and the output shows:

"RenditionName" : "AppIcon1024x1024_UIAppearanceAny_934C06E8-EFEE-45F8-8FF6-8AA1C5A331E2-5653-00000994CD30DD2A.png",
"SizeOnDisk" : 1085726
...
 "RenditionName" : "AppIcon1024x1024_UIAppearanceDark_61E3B30A-4E8A-4427-89EE-9BE9233265D9-5653-00000994CD6F1916.png",
"SizeOnDisk" : 1230822
...
"RenditionName" : "AppIcon1024x1024_ISAppearanceTintable_395EBE2C-F852-46DB-B18D-07F4FD33A361-5653-00000994CDA26BA3.png",
"SizeOnDisk" : 494329

I tried just deleting the entire Assets part of the Xcode project and got the same results

This seems like something that Apple's OSs should be able to just generate once the app is installed if needed instead of prepackaging in every .app and wasting space if not used.

Am I crazy for wanting this? I got my AppIcon.icon down from 15KB to 5KB but having 2.8MB wasted for something that doesn't seem important at all bothers me

Answer 1

Claude31 OP

13h

Could you show where this assets.car is ? I do not find such a file in any of my projects.

Answer 2

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

12h

@pigeonpoplarpop Thanks for the post. If you completely deleted the Assets.xcassets folder from your Xcode project and the resulting Assets.car was still 2.8MB, are you are looking at a cached build?

The app file on your Mac contains the assets for every device. When a user downloads your app from the App Store, use App Slicing. The user's device only downloads the specific assets it needs. Proceed through the menus and ensure App Thinning is set to "All compatible device variants". Once exported, open the folder and look at the file App Thinning Size Report.txt. You can find the documentation here:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/reducing-your-app-s-size#Create-the-app-size-report

Select your App Icon in Assets.xcassets and look at the Attributes Inspector (right sidebar). Ensure you only have the platforms you actually support checked. If "Mac" or "watchOS" is checked, is generating massive 1024x1024 icons for those platforms as well.

Because flat colors compress incredibly well, this might shave off a large chunk compared to letting Xcode auto-generate complex tinted versions of your main icon.

Hope this helps, I would suggest to go over the link on the post I have provided in this post.

Albert  WWDR

Answer 3

pigeonpoplarpop OP

5h

So I tried deleting the <APP>/Assets.xcassets/AppIcon.appiconset/Contents.json file (Deleting from Assets node in Xcode), cleaning my build folder and derived data from Product -> Delete Derived data, bumping my version number to ensure it's a different version I'm checking, then going through the same process I did before and outputting it, and I still see 3.5MB compressed, 4.5MB uncompressed, and 2.8MB in assets.car

The only thing showing in my Assets part in Xcode is "AccentColor"

To ask differently, is it even possible to get the assets.car file to not have the AppIcon variants inside of it that take up multiple megabytes? This is on MacOS 27.

I can't attach the assets.car so I'll put the report

App Thinning Size Report.txt

assets.json