How to localize your Google Play listing for more downloads

By Digital Sauce · Updated July 2026 · 5 min read

Most of the world doesn't speak your app's default language. A visitor who sees your listing in their own language — title, screenshots and all — is far more likely to install. Localization is one of the highest-return things you can do in ASO, and Google Play makes it straightforward once you know what to translate.

What to localize

Google Play lets you provide a separate version of your store listing for each language. The pieces worth translating, in rough priority order:

• App title — up to 30 characters. Include your main keyword in-language.
• Short description — up to 80 characters. This is the one-liner near the top of the listing; it does a lot of the persuading.
• Full description — up to 4,000 characters. This is also what Google indexes for search (see below).
• Screenshot captions — the headlines on your screenshots. Untranslated captions in a foreign language quietly kill trust.
• Feature graphic text — if yours contains a tagline, translate it too.

Google Play has no keyword field

Which languages first?

Start with the markets where you already get installs or where your category is big: often Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), German, French, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian. Check your Play Console country data and prioritise the languages with real traffic before chasing the long tail.

A note on locale codes

Google Play mostly uses standard codes like es-ES or pt-BR, but a few are legacy: Hebrew is iw-IL (not he-IL) and Indonesian is in-ID (not id-ID). If an upload for one of those languages fails, the code is usually why.

A simple localization workflow

1. Write your captions and store listing in your source language first, and get them right.
2. Translate them into each target language — then have a native speaker sanity-check the important ones. Machine translation is a great first draft, not a final one.
3. Localize the screenshots themselves, not just the store text, so the captions match the language of the listing.
4. Export a correctly-sized screenshot set per language and upload each to its language in the Play Console.

Do it without spreadsheets

Playboard is built for exactly this. Write a caption once, translate it into every language in a click — on-device in Chrome, so no API key and nothing leaves your browser — then export a separate, correctly-sized screenshot set for each locale, organised by device and language. It even flags any language still showing your source text.