Hindi App Store Localization: Storefronts and Keyword Bytes

India has the longest additional-language list in the table, with eleven against nine for the United States: Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Hindi is only one of eleven, and the default is English (U.K.). Apple gives each of those a locale of its own in the list of metadata languages. Check the storefront on the India keyword page.

The Hindi shortcode in the App Store Connect API is hi, and the others carry region suffixes such as ta-IN and te-IN. Start with the language that most of your users speak, not with all eleven.

• Default language in none: Apple's table never makes Hindi the default.
• Additional language in 1: India.

Where Hindi is an additional language, the default beside it is English (U.K.).

Apple's keyword reference allows 100 bytes, not 100 characters. Counted as UTF-8, the example below contains 2 one-byte and 32 three-byte characters (separators excluded). At three bytes a character the field holds at most 33 characters of keywords, 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:

आदतें,दैनिक दिनचर्या,लक्ष्य निर्धारण

That is 36 characters and 100 bytes: 98 bytes of keywords plus 2 commas, leaving 0 of the 100 bytes free. The byte counts assume UTF-8; confirm the final count in App Store Connect before you save.

Devanagari is written with consonants and attached vowel signs, each its own code point and each three bytes. आदतें is four visible clusters but six code points, 18 bytes. The table counts code points.

Apple does not document how it counts characters for the three-character minimum, so avoid words that only just pass. It also does not document whether search handles Hindi written in Latin letters, a common typing habit, so test an English-script keyword next to the Devanagari one. The cost per character is the same as Thai, Japanese and Korean.

LocalASO checks keywords in 52 App Store storefronts, each in the storefront's local language, so you can compare your Hindi 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: Thai, English (U.K.), Arabic, Indonesian.