Localizing your app listing into Japanese

Storefronts and localization names read from Apple’s App Store localizations reference; language codes and field limits from Google Play’s translation language list and each store’s field reference. Checked August 29, 2026.

Japan is one of the App Store’s largest revenue markets and the storefront default is Japanese, so an English-only listing is competing in the wrong language in a market that rewards the right one.

Japanese is three bytes per character in UTF-8, so Apple’s 100-byte keyword field holds only about 33 Japanese characters. Play, by contrast, counts a full-width character as one character against its limits.

Where a Japanese listing appears

Apple publishes the default language of all 173 App Store storefronts. Japanese is the default in 1 of them.

Default language in

What you translate, and what it costs you

Both stores cap the same fields, and neither cap changes by language — but the amount of meaning you fit inside them does. Apple’s keyword field is the one that surprises people: it is measured in bytes, so Kanji, hiragana and katakana at about 3 bytes per character leaves roughly 33 characters. Google Play counts characters instead, and says so explicitly: its limits “apply to both full-width and half-width characters”.

The screenshots are part of the localization

Both stores let you upload a separate screenshot set per localization, and in practice the captions are what sells — a translated description under English screenshots converts like an English listing. Design the frames once, then export the same layout per language rather than rebuilding it: that is the difference between localizing into Japanese in an afternoon and not doing it at all.