English (U.K.) App Store Localization: Storefronts and Keyword Bytes

The en-GB locale differs from en-US in spelling and vocabulary. Organiser and organizer, or colour and color, are different strings in your keyword field. Apple does not document whether search treats such spellings as the same word, so do not assume it either way. Search both spellings in the storefront you care about, compare the apps that appear, and spend bytes on the second spelling only if the results differ.

The comparison is cheap because both spellings are plain ASCII: every letter costs one byte, so a spelling variant costs exactly its length plus one comma.

• Default language in 134: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Malaysia, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Thailand, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and Vietnam, plus 105 more storefronts that have no LocalASO country page.
• Additional language in 36: Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, China mainland, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Gabon, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Italy, Macau, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Venezuela.

English (U.K.) is the only localization Apple lists for 71 storefronts; the other 63 list at least one more language (French in 26, Arabic in 15, Croatian in 4, Dutch in 2, Spanish (Mexico) in 2, Greek in 2, Turkish in 2, Urdu in 2, Czech in one, Danish in one, Finnish in one, Hungarian in one, Bangla in one, Gujarati in one, Hindi in one, Kannada in one, Malayalam in one, Marathi in one, Odia in one, Punjabi in one, Tamil in one, Telugu in one, Indonesian in one, Hebrew in one, German in one, Malay in one, Norwegian in one, Polish in one, Romanian in one, Chinese (Simplified) in one, Slovak in one, Slovenian in one, Thai in one, Russian in one, Ukrainian in one and Vietnamese in one).

Where English (U.K.) is an additional language, the default beside it is Spanish (Mexico) in 16, French in 4, German in 3, Chinese (Traditional) in 3, Portuguese (Brazil) in one, Simplified Chinese in one, Italian in one, Dutch in one, English (Australia) in one, Portuguese (Portugal) in one, Korean in one, Russian in one, Spanish (Spain) in one and Swedish in one.

Apple's keyword reference allows 100 bytes, not 100 characters. Counted as UTF-8, the example below contains 65 one-byte characters (separators excluded). Every letter costs one byte, so the field holds up to 100 characters, commas included. The words below are a hypothetical keyword list for a habit tracker called Streakly; they are illustrations, not validated search terms, and each has at least three characters.

Joined with commas and no spaces after them, the field is:

habit tracker,routine,goals,daily,reminders,organiser,planner,motivation

That is 72 characters and 72 bytes: 65 bytes of keywords plus 7 commas, leaving 28 of the 100 bytes free. The byte counts assume UTF-8; confirm the final count in App Store Connect before you save.

The number is large because Apple uses English (U.K.) as the default almost everywhere that has no local-language default. 71 of those rows list no additional language, so for those storefronts an English listing is the only localization Apple offers you. In the rest, a local language sits beside it: Norway has Norwegian, Poland has Polish, Thailand has Thai. For those storefronts the English listing is the second match for a local searcher, and the local locale is the first.

The rule that decides what a shopper sees is Apple's fallback: if no localization matches a user's language, the next most relevant localization is used. Read the full logic in the guide to how many App Store localizations you need. For U.S. English see English (U.S.), and for the New Zealand split see English (Australia).

LocalASO checks keywords in 52 App Store storefronts, each in the storefront's local language, so you can compare your English (U.K.) candidates with the English ones in one place. Keywords, ranks and listings stay in a database on your Mac. LocalASO is a one-time $29 purchase and the app needs a license key to run; the setup is in the localization docs and the price is on the pricing page. To test the field you just built, use the keyword field checker, or browse every language page. See also: English (U.S.), English (Australia), Norwegian, Polish, French (Canada), Hindi.