Overview

This is Algolia's Search SDK's offline Core. As the name implies, it brings offline search capabilities to your application.

The Core is typically not used standalone. Rather, you should use it as a complement to our online API client. Please refer to the client for more information.

Licensing

Please note that the Core is licensed separately from our SaaS offer. In particular, it requires a valid license key to be provided during initialization, or it will refuse to function.

For detailed licensing information, please refer to the LICENSE.md file and to our website.

Technical considerations

Binary size

The Core binaries include Bitcode, so as to offer you the possibility to ship Bitcode with your application.

Bitcode increases the binary size a lot: a Bitcode segment gets added to every architecture's slice (except simulator archs), and Bitcode is essentially LLVM IR (Intermediate Representation), which is far more verbose than any actual target (machine) code. For example, the ARM v7 slice is normally around 1.3 MB; Bitcode adds 6.3 MB, for a total of 7.6 MB!

Fortunately, as of iOS 9, Apple introduced App Thinning, which ensures that users will only download the slice that is relevant for their device. Furthermore, Bitcode will be stripped from this slice by the App Store.

However, if you target iOS 8 or earlier, users will still download every slice and a fortiori Bitcode. If you don't want that and you don't need Bitcode (caution: Apple makes it mandatory for certain targets!), you can manually strip the Bitcode segment from the binaries using this script:

xcrun bitcode_strip -r AlgoliaSearchOfflineCore.framework/AlgoliaSearchOfflineCore -o AlgoliaSearchOfflineCore.framework/AlgoliaSearchOfflineCore