Which languages should you localize your app for first?
A prioritization framework for App Store localization: which markets pay, which are underserved, and which languages give indie developers the best return.
Localization advice usually stops at "you should do it". Fine — but into which of the App Store's 30+ languages, in what order? Translating everything everywhere is expensive; translating nothing leaves money in every non-English storefront. Here's a practical prioritization framework for indie developers.
Start with your own data, not a listicle
Open App Store Connect → Analytics and segment downloads and impressions by territory. Two patterns are gold:
- Territories with impressions but poor conversion — people find you, then bounce off an English page. Localization directly fixes this.
- Territories where you already convert despite English — demand strong enough to survive the language barrier. Localization amplifies it.
Whatever ranks in your top non-English territories outranks any generic list, including the one below.
The tier list (when you don't have data yet)
For a paid or freemium productivity/utility app with no territory data, this is the order that tends to pay off:
Tier 1 — high revenue, high localization sensitivity
- Japanese — the App Store's most famously underserved big market. Japanese users convert dramatically better on fully-localized pages, and competition from English-only devs filters itself out.
- German — large paid-app market, strong preference for German-language product pages.
- Simplified Chinese — enormous market; worth it if your app category is viable in mainland China.
Tier 2 — large audiences, good ROI
- French, Spanish (one localization covers Spain + most of Latin America), Korean — big markets where English-only pages visibly underperform.
- Portuguese (Brazil) — huge, growing, and hungry for localized apps.
Tier 3 — cheap wins
- Italian, Dutch, Turkish — smaller markets but often near-zero localized competition in niches.
Localize the product page before the app
Counterintuitive but important: your App Store product page and your app don't have to be localized together. A localized product page — title, subtitle, description, keywords, and screenshots — improves discoverability and conversion in that storefront even while the app itself stays English (be upfront in the description if so).
This flips the economics. Localizing the page is days of work, not months, and it tells you which markets respond before you invest in localizing the app itself.
The order of impact on the page:
- Keywords + subtitle — this is what makes you appear in Japanese or German searches at all.
- Screenshots — what converts those impressions. Caption text in the local language signals "this app respects this market" in the first two seconds.
- Description — matters for the minority who read it.
The screenshot bottleneck (and how it disappeared)
Historically, screenshots were the expensive part: ten frames × eight languages = eighty hand-rebuilt images, and every design tweak multiplied across all of them. This is exactly the problem AI translation-in-place solves — Screenshot Roast's Localize mode translates the text inside your existing screenshots into any of 34 App Store languages while keeping layout, palette, and typography pixel-equivalent. Eighty images becomes an upload and a language picker. The full localization guide covers the workflow.
A rollout plan that doesn't overwhelm
- Month 1: localize page metadata + screenshots for your top 2 data-driven territories (or Japanese + German by default).
- Month 2: measure impressions and conversion per territory in App Store Connect. Expand to the next 2–3 languages where the first wave moved numbers.
- Only then consider localizing the app UI itself for your best-performing market.
Localization is one of the few ASO levers that gets less competitive as you go down the language list — most competitors stopped at English.