Thai App Store Localization: Storefronts and Keyword Bytes

Thailand is the only row that names Thai. The default is English (U.K.). Without the th locale, a Thai user sees the primary language or the next most relevant localization. See the Thailand keyword page for the storefront and Vietnamese for the neighboring Southeast Asian row.

The locale code Apple gives is th.

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

Where Thai 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 25 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:

สร้างนิสัย,กิจวัตรประจำวัน

That is 26 characters and 76 bytes: 75 bytes of keywords plus 1 commas, leaving 24 of the 100 bytes free. The byte counts assume UTF-8; confirm the final count in App Store Connect before you save.

Thai writes vowels and tone marks as separate code points above and below the consonants. A word that looks like four letters can be seven code points, and each is three bytes. The table below counts code points. Apple does not document how it counts characters for its three-character minimum or whether it counts marks, so use words well above the limit.

Thai is also written without spaces between words. Apple's reference allows spaces inside a phrase, but it does not document how Thai text is split into words, so test each keyword by searching for it. The same three-byte cost applies to Hindi, Japanese and Korean.

LocalASO checks keywords in 52 App Store storefronts, each in the storefront's local language, so you can compare your Thai 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: Vietnamese, Hindi, Japanese, Indonesian.