How to Localize App Store Screenshots for 32 Languages Without Losing Your Mind

Apple's App Store supports 39 storefronts in 28 languages. Most indie devs ship English screenshots only — and miss 60% of the planet. Localized assets are one of the highest-ROI changes you can make to a listing, but the rejection traps are real. Here's the practical guide.

Translate everything (yes, the in-phone UI too)

The #1 mistake: translating only the outer headline. A Spanish App Store visitor sees "Tu agenda, organizada" as the headline but "My Calendar / Tasks / Settings" inside the phone — and bounces. The signal reads as "this app isn't really localized." Translate the headline AND every visible string inside the phone bezel.

What to never translate

• Numbers and dates in numeric form: "$12.99", "24 Mar", "12:45". They're already universal.
• Brand names, app names, product names. "Notion" stays "Notion".
• @usernames, email addresses, URLs. Identifiers, not language.
• Currency symbols — unless the target locale conventionally uses a different one.
• Status bar text — always show 9:41, full bars, full battery in any locale.

Length matters

Translations vary in width by language. A headline that fits a phone frame in English will overflow in German, Russian, and Finnish — they run 30–50% longer. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese are shorter in character count but each character is 1.5–2× the rendered width of a Latin character. Plan font sizes around the longest target language.

RTL languages

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu read right-to-left. The headline alignment, the phone tilt direction, and the floating UI extracts all need to mirror. Most tools forget this; the result reads broken to a native speaker.

Which markets to target first

Don't try to launch in 32 locales on day one. Start with the 5 markets that drive 60% of global App Store revenue:

1. United States (English)
2. China (Simplified Chinese)
3. Japan (Japanese)
4. Germany (German)
5. United Kingdom (English) — already covered by US

Add more locales based on App Store Connect analytics — wherever the most organic search impressions come from, localize next.

Validation before submission

Always have a native speaker eyeball each locale before you upload. Machine translation is good enough at the headline level but consistently misses idiom — and a bad idiom in your top market is worse than no localization at all.