A well-translated app can stay impossible to find. Translation makes the listing understandable; it does not guarantee that anyone will come across it while searching. That is the job of ASO, App Store Optimisation, and it is different work in every language. We did it for Tome, our comics reader, whose listing exists in French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese. Here is what we learned, checked against Apple’s and Google’s documentation.
What search really reads
At Apple, an app’s relevance to a search rests on its name, subtitle, keyword field and category, then on user behaviour: downloads, ratings, reviews. The description is not on that list, and Apple states that promotional text does not affect ranking. Space is tight: 30 characters for the name, 30 for the subtitle, and 100 bytes for keywords. Bytes, not characters: an accented letter uses two, a Japanese character three. A list that fits in French can overflow in Japanese.
Google Play works differently: a 30-character title, an 80-character short description and a 4,000-character full description, with no keyword field. Google asks for everyday language rather than a list of keywords, and rules out repetition and unrelated references.
Keywords do not translate
This is the main lesson. People do not search for the same thing with the same words from one country to the next. A French or Belgian reader searches for “BD”, an American for “comics”, a Brazilian for “HQ” or “quadrinhos”. Translating French keywords word for word gives a correct and useless list. For Tome, the Brazilian name became “Tome – Quadrinhos e Mangá”, because that is what people type there.
Connotations matter too. In French, the word “scan” draws searches linked to manga piracy: we dropped it, even though it would have brought volume. A listing gets reviewed with someone who knows the language and the market, not just the dictionary. For the app’s own text, a review per language led us to correct 80 translations, including three outright mistranslations, such as a Spanish “libro de texto”, which means a school textbook.
Do not borrow other people’s brands
It is tempting to slip a competing app’s name or a compatible service into your keywords. Both stores forbid it. Apple’s guideline 2.3.7 asks you not to pack your metadata with trademarked terms, popular app names or irrelevant phrases, and Apple reserves the right to modify inappropriate keywords. Google rules out repetitive keywords, a celebrity’s name or a brand’s logo without permission, and ranking claims such as “#1” or “app of the year”. For Tome, we removed the names of compatible personal servers from the keywords, even though the app can read them.
Belgium, a special case
On the Belgian App Store, the default language is neither French nor Dutch, but British English. Dutch and French are offered in addition. The language someone sees depends on their store, their phone settings and the languages you provide. A Belgian app that only exists in French may therefore show its fallback listing to part of its audience. ASO specialists also observe that keywords from a store’s secondary languages count in its search results too; Apple does not officially confirm this, but it is one more reason to fill in every language carefully.
Screenshots speak too
Both stores accept screenshots specific to each language, and Google explicitly recommends separate screenshots as soon as they contain text. A translated listing with screenshots left in French sends an odd signal. For Tome, every screenshot exists in all seven languages, with the app’s interface set to the listing’s language. Once live, Apple lets you test up to three page variants, language by language, and Google offers comparable experiments.
A listing in seven languages is seven launches: each has its own words, its own screenshots and its own first reviews.
Ratings start from zero in each country
A last point, often forgotten: at Apple, the rating shown is specific to each country. An app with excellent ratings in France starts with none in Brazil. And ratings weigh on ranking. Apple lets you prompt for a rating up to three times in a 365-day period; Google applies a quota it does not disclose, and asks developers not to trigger the prompt from a button. The right moment is chosen with care: after a success, never in the middle of a task.
A multilingual app is prepared in the code, as we explained in our article on multilingual apps, then defended on the stores, language by language. It is work we carry out with our clients right up to publication, in product engineering. Let’s talk about your launch: we will tell you which markets deserve a real listing, and which can wait.