UTF-8 (and the keyword field)

Exact counts from tests: café is 4 characters and 5 bytes; привычки is 8 characters and 16 bytes; 習慣化 is 3 characters and 9 bytes.

Apple's App Store Connect reference counts bytes for the keyword field and for App Review Notes. Apple does not name the encoding in the text we checked, so UTF-8 is the standard way to count it, and you should confirm the total with a checker tool before you submit. Apple's marketing pages say "100 characters", which is wording, not the measure.

A 100-byte budget holds about 100 English letters, about 50 Cyrillic letters, or about 33 Japanese characters. Every comma is one byte. The effect is a smaller keyword list in many languages, as covered under byte limit and CJK characters.

A hypothetical German listing might include Gewohnheiten (12 bytes) and Übung (6 bytes, since Ü uses two). The Ü costs an extra byte, so a list with many umlauts is slightly shorter than it looks.

• Counting characters in a text editor and trusting the number.
• Forgetting that the minimum keyword length is also counted in characters: each keyword must be longer than two.

Count exactly with the keyword field checker and the character counter.