Storefront (App Store)

Apple's App Store Connect help states the App Store is available in 175 countries or regions. Rankings are per storefront, so an app that is first for a term in the United States can be invisible for it in Germany. That is why the ranking by country guide treats each country as a separate game.

A storefront is a place. A locale is a language version of your metadata, such as de-DE. One storefront can show several locales. In Apple's localizations table, Switzerland has German as its default language plus English (U.K.), French and Italian. Canada has English (Canada) as default plus French (Canada). If no localization matches a user's language, the next most relevant one is used, and in other countries the primary language is shown.

A hypothetical habit tracker with only an English listing may reach Swiss users through the fallback, but a German, French and Italian localization lets each group search in its own language. Apple states users can search with localized keywords in all countries or regions where the localization is shown.

LocalASO checks keywords in 52 App Store storefronts, each in the storefront's local language. It does not cover all 175.

See country-specific examples on the App Store keywords by country pages and learn how rank is measured in search volume and keyword difficulty.

To see what a storefront returns for a term, the iTunes Search API accepts a country parameter. Rankings and strategy both fall under ASO.

A missing language is handled by localization fallback.

Pre-orders can be limited to regions; see pre-orders.