11/06/2025, 21:39 How I reduce the iOS Banking app size by 50% | by Tuan Hoang (Eric) | Level Up Coding

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How I reduce the iOS Banking app size by 50%

5 min read · Dec 1, 2024

Tuan Hoang (Eric) Follow

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Photo by claudiotesta

TPBank is my daily use Vietnam banking app, and I’ve used it for 6 years. Recently, I
looked at its app size for the first time and I was shocked.

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11/06/2025, 21:39 How I reduce the iOS Banking app size by 50% | by Tuan Hoang (Eric) | Level Up Coding

650 MB. 2x bigger than the average Vietnam banking app size

I was curious, and I dug into it.

In this article, I will write about things I’ve found and some solutions to cut the app
size by half. I hope you can learn something and apply these techniques to your iOS
project.

Shout out to Emerge for their awesome tools.

1. Unused heavy resources
When checking their bundle, I realized they use specific mp4 files and images for
special events, such as the New Year and Christmas. However, it’s December now.
Keeping the 2024 New Year event resources in the app is unnecessary and we should
remove it.

I found these New Year resources by filtering the keyword “tet” (New Year in
Vietnamese). Removing all of these resources can reduce the app size by 30MB.

2. Non-optimize resources
The asset size of the TPBank app is 200MB. It’s even bigger than some other banking
apps.

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I noticed 2 problems when I analyzed the app:

2.1. Not compress images
The TPBank app has a lot of big images. Lots of image sizes are greater than 2MB.

We can reduce the image sizes through lossy compression or convert it to HEIC
format. It can reduce the app size by 159.7 MB 🤯

2.2. Using iPad image for iOS app

Filtering the resources with the “iPad” keyword gave me these results:

The TPBank iOS Bundle contains resources for iPad. This is because they configured
the images as Universal. We can change it to iPad for these images, and Apple will
help us to remove it for the iOS App (App Thinning). Doing that will help to reduce
the iOS app size by 20MB.

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2.3 Can’t utilize App thinning

Some of the modules of the TPBank app are built by using Flutter.

However, the assets in the Flutter module can’t be optimized by using 1x/2x/3x
assets and App thinning. That leads to a huge asset size (17.1 MB assets just for the
Flutter module).
3. Duplicate resources

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A bird’s-eye view can easily see that TPBank contains a lot of duplicated resources:
images and fonts.

lots of duplicated resources

Upon examining the bundle, I noticed that some of the frameworks include their
own embedded fonts.

We can transfer these duplicated resources and fonts to a shared UI bundle. The
potential savings calculated by the Emerge tool is almost 28MB.

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We can also integrate some tools to help us detect duplicate resources, which I have
mentioned in my previous article.
4. Unstrip Binary Symbols
Swift binaries include large amounts of symbols in a segment of the binary used by
the dynamic linker. These are generally not needed in production builds. The
TPBank app doesn’t strip these unnecessary symbols, which increases the app size.

To strip binary symbols, we can refer to this guidance from Emerge. The potential
savings for the app size are 55 MB

5. Low exposure rate resources

I used Emerge Tools and Asset Catalog Tinkerer to examine the assets more closely.
I found numerous advertisement-heavy images that I have never seen used in the
app.

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advertisement image for Sunlife

99% of users will not see these event images because they are not in the core
business flows of the app. These images have a low exposure rate.

Due to their heavy size (lots of images are ~4MB), we can consider moving them to
CDN to help reduce the app size and benefit 99% of users.

These simple, low-hanging fruit solutions can reduce the app size by more than
300MB (~ 50% of the original size).

There are still many other improvements we can make, such as:

Removing unused images (I believe they have many)

Change to use static library (Strip unused code)
Enhancing the app’s security (I better not mention it here 😂)
…
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11/06/2025, 21:39 How I reduce the iOS Banking app size by 50% | by Tuan Hoang (Eric) | Level Up Coding

Now, where can I submit this article to TPBank Bounty Bug to get some cash?

If you find this post helpful, please hit the like button and leave a comment so that
Medium can recommend the article to others.

Thanks for reading.

Swift IOS IOS App Development Mobile App Development

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11/06/2025, 21:39 How I reduce the iOS Banking app size by 50% | by Tuan Hoang (Eric) | Level Up Coding

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Responses (6)

Anderson Silva Software

What are your thoughts?

Niaaz Wahab
Niaa
Dec 5, 2024

Great article! I’d always wondered why apps like DBS, UOB, HSBC were so huge. I assumed it was because of
extraneous features or security obfuscation… I didn’t expect things like duplicate assets 😂
6 Reply

sonvuhwg
sonv Feb 28
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11/06/2025, 21:39 How I reduce the iOS Banking app size by 50% | by Tuan Hoang (Eric) | Level Up Coding

Nice article

5 Reply

Baldeagle
Bald Feb 19

I used to have the Facebook app on my phone. It's about 250MB and they update it every couple weeks. I
never used it and I realized I was using GB of data to update this app regularly. So I deleted it, which is the
best way to cut down on data usage. 😀
1 1 reply Reply

See all responses

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