App size / bundle budget
A hard ceiling for how much the store download and installed app may weigh, so new code and assets cannot quietly bloat every release.
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What it is
App size is at least two numbers: the compressed download from the store and the space the installed app occupies. A bundle budget is your team's ceiling for those numbers, usually split by platform and representative device. Smaller downloads ask less of a person's data plan, patience, and remaining storage at the exact moment they decide to install.
Set the budget before adding a video model, another CPU architecture, or a library full of assets. Track the production store estimate on every release and make the largest regressions name their owner. Store limits and cellular behavior can change, so treat the console's current report as the authority and your own tighter budget as the engineering guardrail.
Gotcha: the IPA or AAB on your laptop measures the upload artifact. Store compression, app thinning, split APKs, signing, and the target device produce the customer's download size. Compare like with like, including the same device profile and build mode, or a supposed 20 MB win may be nothing more than a different measurement.
Ask AI for it
Add an app-size budget to this release pipeline. Use Xcode's App Thinning Size Report for iOS and bundletool get-size total for the Android App Bundle. Apply these compressed-download and installed-size limits per representative device: [paste budgets and device matrix]. Store a JSON baseline for the last production version, print total size plus the ten largest file or module contributors, and fail CI when either an absolute budget or regression allowance is exceeded. Return the CI configuration, measurement commands, baseline schema, and a sample failure report. Do not compare debug builds or raw IPA and AAB file sizes.