Localizing App Can Double Downloads

By Author: Molly Mo
Total Articles: 63
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App store provide the chance for apps to get into the hands for the people all around the world, but it is not easy to make apps become popular and well-known by these people. They have the right to choose what they want and what they like. For your app store optimization service, we want to introduce you the different about internationalization and localization, hope it can point you to the right direction for your app developer.

For localization, we can get to know from the data, it shows that even though some non-English speakers may already be using your app in English, your app is significantly more likely to be downloaded if it is targeted for specific languages. Therefore, you need to localize your app.

Localization simply means that you are going to translate all the language elements of your app into another local language. On top of that, there may be some cultural translations that need to be made, like changing the date format from mm/dd/yyyy to dd/mm/yyyy, or using the metric system.

The first place to start is your App Store seo metadata. This includes:

App title
App description
...
... Screenshots
Keywords
Privacy policy URL
Support URL
Marketing URL
What's New in this Version

No matter how good your app is, if people who speak a certain language cannot find it, they will never know how awesome it is. Localizing your title, description, keywords and screenshots will help them find your app more easily. After you tune your metadata, then you need to rework your app.

This includes changing:

Instructions
Notifications
Icon
Home screen
Help text

Remember, syntactic and cultural nuances can get lost in (Google) translation. Be sure to sit down with a professional translator and/or query several native speakers to be sure that what you are presenting makes sense in that culture/language.

Internationalization is the technique for organizing localized resources so that an app can select the user-preferred set of resources at runtime.”

So you can think of it as a method of displaying all the language and culture specific translations that we talked about in localization for app store optimization, based on what the user wants to see. However, it can also be though of in a broader sense, as in, how to expand your app business into other countries.

If the latter is your ultimate goal, then you may want to start small and see how much traction you can get in another language by making a few simple localization tweaks. You can do a simple test by translating your app title, search keywords, app description and change log.

Just like launching your app in your current market, you will also need to localize your marketing, find public relations and customer support and hire a local lawyer to help protect your interests. Not a small task, but as we have seen, the payoff can be huge.

We do hope what we talked today can become an energy for your aso services, can encourage and provide you more power to make your App develop better all around the world and become really popular.