How to localize App Store and Google Play screenshots

Shoppers scan screenshots in a split second, and they scan faster in their own language. Localized screenshots are one of the cheapest conversion wins available — especially on Google Play, where most installs come from outside English-speaking markets.

Decide what to localize

1. Headlines and subheadlines — always. They are short, cheap to translate and carry the pitch.
2. The screenshots themselves — for your top markets. Capture the app in each language (simulators and emulators make this scriptable).
3. Imagery and examples — currencies, names, maps and dates that feel local. Nice to have.

Organize files by language

Storedeck detects language suffixes in file names: home.png, home_de.png, home-pt-br.png and home_ja.png all become versions of the same home screen. Missing languages fall back to your default language, and the Board view shows every screen × language combination at once so gaps stand out.

Translate in a strings table

The Strings view is a spreadsheet of every headline, subheadline and text badge per language, with missing translations highlighted. Translators can work there directly, or an AI agent can fill it using the get_strings and set_copy WebMCP tools — see automating with AI agents.

Long words, short scripts

• German, Finnish and Dutch run 20–35% longer than English and have long compound words. Instead of shrinking every language, turn on custom sizes for this language in the text panel and give it a slightly smaller size or more lines.
• Japanese, Chinese and Korean are compact; the same headline can go larger. Storedeck wraps CJK and Thai text at proper word boundaries rather than overflowing.
• Use manual line breaks (\n) in copy for deliberate phrasing — they are kept per language.

Right-to-left languages

For Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu, text is rendered right-to-left and left/right alignment mirrors automatically. Consider mirroring layouts that point toward the device (arrows, side-by-side text) too, and capture the app in its RTL layout.

Fonts that cover the script

Many display fonts only cover Latin. When a glyph is missing, the browser falls back to a system font, which can look inconsistent. Pick a family with broad coverage — Noto Sans has variants for Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali and Thai — or set a different font per screen set for those markets.

Which languages first?

Start with the languages where you already have traffic (App Store Connect and Play Console show impressions by country), then the large markets that respond most to localization: Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. For India-focused apps, Hindi plus one or two regional languages (Telugu, Tamil, Bengali) often outperform English-only listings.

Frequently asked questions