The ipa you upload is the compressed size before app thinning and encryption. The App Store size is install size for a specific device. There are some built in tools like generating an app size thinning report that help estimate these numbers but none are completely accurate. The Emerge Tools service also helps you measure and understand these numbers.

You might want to start with optimizing assets and making sure all files in the app bundle are needed. You can use products like Emerge Tools to visualize size and decide what to reduce.

otool will show you linked dynamic frameworks but not static frameworks that are compiled into your main executable. You can inspect symbols in dsym files to see what is in your main app binary and look for any static frameworks, or use a service like Emerge Tools to scan for these automatically.

I'm seeing this issue as well, and unfortunately the activate followed by launch approach has other issues with the environment variables specified in a test not applying to the launch. Has anyone seen if this still happens on 15.5?