Which languages should you localize your app store listing into?
Most advice on this question answers a different one. You ask "which languages should I localize for," and the reply is a wall of statistics about the global app economy. Useful trivia, no decision. This post is the decision.
There are roughly 50 metadata languages on the App Store today (Apple went from 39 to 50 in March 2026, adding eleven mostly Indian languages) and even more listing locales on Google Play. You are not going to do all of them, and you shouldn't. The goal is a short, ranked list you can act on this week.
First, separate the listing from the app
These are two different projects with two very different costs, and conflating them is the most common mistake.
- The store listing — your title, subtitle, description, keywords, and screenshots. Translating these changes what a shopper sees before they install. It touches no app code and ships instantly from App Store Connect and Play Console.
- The app UI — every string inside the running app. Translating this is real engineering work: extracting strings, wiring a localization system, re-testing every screen, maintaining it on every release.
The cheap, sensible order is to localize the listing first and defer the app translation until the data earns it. ASO people call this minimum viable localization: put a translated storefront in front of a market, watch whether installs and (crucially) retention hold up, and only then pay to translate the app itself. A localized listing with an English app is a perfectly good test. A fully translated app for a market that never converts is money you can't get back.
So the framework below is about the listing. Treat app-UI translation as a separate, later decision you make per market, based on retention.
The two forces pulling in opposite directions
Markets sort along a spending axis and a volume axis, and the two rarely line up. Direction over precision here — treat these as guidance, not a rate card, because the exact numbers move by category and by year.
- High revenue per user. A handful of mature markets punch far above their population on spend. Japan is the standout — its top titles have historically shown roughly double the revenue per user of the US — with Germany and South Korea in the same high-spend tier. Fewer downloads, but each one is worth more.
- High download volume. India leads global installs by a wide margin, with Brazil and Indonesia close behind. Enormous reach, but revenue per user runs much lower, and monetization tends to lean on ads and low price points rather than paid installs or subscriptions.
Neither axis wins outright. A premium subscription app should weight the first list; an ad-funded app that lives on scale should weight the second. Most apps want a couple from each, chosen to fit their pricing model.
The decision framework
Three tiers. Do them in order. Stop wherever your appetite for maintenance runs out — a listing localized to Tier 1 already covers most of the world's app spend.
Tier 1 — start here. The languages almost every app should localize the listing into, because they combine large audiences with proven willingness to spend:
- Spanish and Portuguese (Brazil) — huge combined reach across the Americas and Spain.
- German, French, Japanese — mature, high-spend markets where a native listing measurably lifts conversion.
- Simplified Chinese — the single largest storefront, if your app is viable there.
Tier 2 — add next. Strong markets to reach once Tier 1 is live and you've seen it move numbers:
- Korean and Italian — smaller but high-intent, good conversion.
- Russian and Turkish — large audiences, category-dependent monetization.
- Portuguese (Portugal) and Dutch if your product skews European.
Tier 3 — nice to have. Volume plays and long-tail reach. Worth it when the marginal cost of another language is near zero (more on that below), or when a specific market shows up in your analytics:
- Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai — massive install volume, lower revenue per user, often ad-monetized.
- Polish, Arabic, and the other regional languages that fit your specific audience.
As a quick reference:
| Tier | Languages | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Start here | Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), German, French, Japanese, Simplified Chinese | Big reach plus proven spend — the core of global app revenue |
| Add next | Korean, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Portuguese (Portugal), Dutch | Strong secondary markets; high-intent or category-dependent |
| Nice to have | Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Polish, Arabic | Volume plays and long-tail reach; add when marginal cost is near zero |
Adjust for your own app. A meditation app with strong US and German retention weights Tier 1 European languages. A social app chasing scale jumps to the Tier 3 volume markets sooner. Your own install and retention data beats any generic list — these tiers are the starting point, not the finish.
One listing can cover several storefronts
A quiet efficiency worth knowing: on the App Store, a single language localization serves related territories through fallback. If you have a French (France) listing but haven't set up French (Canada), the French (France) metadata serves French-speaking Canadians until you add the specific one. The same holds for Spanish (Spain) and Spanish (Mexico), and so on across variants.
Practically, that means one well-written French listing already reaches French speakers across several storefronts, and one Spanish listing does the same across Latin America and Spain. You add the country-specific variant later, when a market is big enough to justify tuning the wording and keywords for it. Start with the base language; refine per territory once the volume is there.
Why "how many" stops being the hard part
Every tier above assumes translation costs something per language — which is why agencies tell you to be selective. That assumption is where Mokbi changes the math. Because it translates the whole listing — the store text and the screenshot captions — into 50 languages in one round, the marginal cost of the twentieth language is close to the cost of the second.
When adding a language is nearly free, the constraint flips. You're no longer rationing translations to protect a budget; you're deciding which markets deserve attention, tuned keywords, and eventually a translated app. That's a prioritization question, and the tiered framework answers it. Do the listing broadly, then invest deeply where the data points.
Screenshots are one step in that flow — Screenshots, feature graphic, store text, translate, publish — so the captions get translated in the same pass as the description, and both stay in sync per locale. You don't localize the text in one tool and the images in another.
A simple sequence to run
- Localize the listing into Tier 1. Metadata plus screenshots, English app underneath. This is your test, not a commitment.
- Watch conversion and retention per market. Installs tell you if the listing works; retention tells you if the market is real.
- Add Tier 2, then Tier 3. Expand while marginal cost is low, and let your own analytics pull specific languages up the list.
- Only then translate the app UI — for the two or three markets that earned it with real retention.
That order keeps the expensive work (app translation) gated behind evidence, and makes the cheap work (a translated storefront) as wide as it usefully can be.