App Store Keywords for Navigation Apps: GPS, Transit and Local Variants

Cells: estimated volume / estimated difficulty, 0-100, English phrases in all six storefronts.

Two details stand out. "Gps" is hard and fairly uniform: difficulty 41 to 62 in every storefront. "Speed camera" is the opposite, a regional word: Germany scores 51 / 35, more than four times the volume of Japan (11). "Public transit" is 54 in the US but 3 in both Great Britain and Japan; a US-style term meets a different local vocabulary in those places ("underground", "metro", and so on), though this test did not measure other words.

The share of apps with 50,000 or more ratings is at the median (20%) even though the median rating count is below it. That is the sign of a category with a few very large players and a long tail of small ones: rating counts in the US run to about 10,800 for the median Navigation result, against 316 in Japan. Names less often use a separator than in most categories, so brand-and-descriptor patterns are less dominant here. By storefront, only 20% of German names and 22% of French names contain the whole query, compared with 58% in both the US and Great Britain.

1. Search words are local. The "speed camera" and "public transit" rows say that an English word can be a niche tag in one storefront and ignored in the next. Build the keyword list per storefront; see ASO for small storefronts for ways to size markets you do not know well.
2. Use the narrow function. "Truck gps" (16.8) and "route planner" (21.3) are cheaper than "gps" (50.3) because they name a user and a task. If your app serves a defined group, say so in the name or subtitle.
3. Be specific about your offline claims. "Offline maps" is moderate outside the US (12 to 37) and high in the US (62). If offline use is real in your app, test the phrase in the markets where you ship.
4. Check the neighbours. Journey apps sit close to Travel; forecasts and radar to Weather; small map utilities may be in Utilities. Read choosing keywords you can rank for to compare candidates.

We tested six English phrases per category with the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in six storefronts and analysed the top 10 results, fetched 2026-11-01: 36 queries and 360 slots per category. The phrase-to-category match is approximate. See the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV.

LocalASO is a Mac app that estimates keyword volume and difficulty in 52 storefronts in the local language of each. It costs $29 one time, and the free download needs a license key to run. See pricing.