Why it works
Most ASO advice is about persuasion at the margin. Localization is not: someone who cannot read your caption is not weighing it and finding it unconvincing, they are skipping it. Removing that barrier is a mechanical improvement, which is why it tends to be one of the more reliable changes available.
It also compounds with paid traffic. Sending localized ad spend to an English listing pays for the click and loses the install at the last step.
Start where you already have signal
Open your analytics and find the territories already installing despite an English listing. Those are people who wanted the app enough to get past a barrier — remove the barrier and you convert more of them. That beats any general list of “top app markets”, because it is about your app.
What actually breaks
- Length. German and Finnish routinely run much longer than English; Japanese and Chinese much shorter. A caption box sized to English wraps badly in one direction and looks empty in the other.
- Direction. Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu are right-to-left. A layout with the device on the left and text on the right does not translate — it mirrors.
- Typography. Not every font has the glyphs. A missing CJK or Arabic range gives you tofu boxes in a shipped screenshot.
- Brand names. Left unguarded, a translator will localize your product name, and you will not notice in a language you do not read.
Review what you cannot read
You will not catch a bad translation in a language you do not speak, but you will catch the layout failures — and those are most of the damage. Look at each locale as rendered, at browsing size, and check three things: does any caption wrap to an unintended line, is anything clipped, and did the right-to-left locales actually mirror rather than just swap the text.
The asset count problem
Screenshots × display classes × languages gets large fast. Eight panels, two display classes and ten languages is a hundred and sixty files, and doing that by hand is why most teams localize their description and stop.
The only workable model is one design that re-renders per locale, with per-locale overrides where a translation genuinely needs a different layout rather than a different string. That is how translation ships here: the set is the source, each language is a render of it.
Locales we carry
50 App Store locales, taken from the same registry the publisher validates against, with 3 right-to-left: Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu.