Do storefronts that share a language share their top 10 apps?

For each pair of storefronts in a language group, the same phrase was searched in both and the Jaccard index of the two top-10 app ID lists was taken, then averaged over the phrases. The control group is eight pairs of storefronts without a shared language (for example US-JP 0.39, DE-BR 0.43, GB-FR 0.48). Local-language comparisons use the candidate translations, which were not verified by native speakers.

The Dutch, Chinese and Portuguese groups have a single storefront pair, so their figures rest on 15 to 20 phrase comparisons and should be treated as anecdotes.

Every language group sits above the control for English phrases (0.50 to 0.63 versus 0.43), and the mean over all 42 same-language pairs is 0.56. Among pairs, the spread within a group is large: in the Spanish group Argentina-Chile (0.61) and Chile-Peru (0.61) were highest and Spain-Peru (0.48) lowest, and in the English group US-Canada (0.65) was highest and US-New Zealand (0.53) lowest.

The gap to the control is 0.13 on a scale from 0 to 1. A control pair such as GB-DE already scored 0.47, which means that even storefronts with no shared language overlap on close to half of their top 10 for these generic English phrases. The conclusion that most overlap is shared global apps follows from that, though the study does not list those apps by name.

Local-language phrases do not behave the same way. For Dutch (0.48) and Chinese (0.46) they sit near the control, while German (0.59) and Spanish (0.54) stay high. With one pair each, the Dutch and Chinese results cannot be generalized.

Rankings in one country are a weak guide to a neighboring country, even when the language is the same. A keyword check in Germany says something about Austria and Switzerland (0.59), but it does not replace checking them. This is a correlation in rating-driven top 10s from generic phrases; it does not tell you whether the same listing text will rank in a neighboring storefront. Use the guide on how many App Store localizations to create to think about which storefronts need their own text. Volume and difficulty are LocalASO estimates from rating counts, not Apple search counts.

One search per phrase and storefront on 2026-11-01; 20 phrases (15 to 19 for local phrases). Several groups have only one or three pairs. The methodology page lists all limits.

LocalASO checks the same keyword across 52 storefronts, each in its local language, so neighboring countries can be compared side by side. It is a one-time $29 Mac app and needs a license key to run. See pricing. The earlier small-storefront comparison looks at competition levels in the same countries.