Question:
The PDFNet DLL for iOS Xamarin is ~120MB. Why is this so large, and how do I reduce the size for my project?
Answer:
The PDFNet iOS DLL contains multiple architectures. At the time your project gets linked, only the required binary data will be used.
The DLL sizes will not be reflected in the final app size due to code being optimized away by the linker. So the app size increase will be much less than the size of the libraries.
You can see this, for example, in our sample app PDFNetiOSXamarinSample, the final device executable size is around ~30MB.
The following links provide some further background:
https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/1292/size-of-executable-in-app-bundle-too-big
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/advanced_topics/linker/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIDI2d86zTE