The importance of App Store localizations (aka "How to drive more downloads to your apps")

MarkOnTheIron

We all know that having an app translated might help you get more downloads from the country where that language is spoken.

With a few exceptions I always was too lazy to take the time to fully localize my games and so I didn't bother either to at least translate the game description.

Then I noticed that Google added an automatic description translation option on the "Edit application" page on Google Play. So I decided to give it a try.

I had two games that were getting about the same amount of downloads every day so I used the new automatic translation option on one of them.

On the image below you can see the effect on the second graph. The red arrow indicate the moment I added the translations. Ever since I noticed an average daily downloads increment for that app of about 10x.

Both games remains localized in english only, but by only translating the game description I was able to get that much many more downloads.

To be noted, however, that both games are free, so the increase in downloads may be substantially lower for paid games. But it's well worth a try

POM

Indeed! Agree with every word, that's why I have support for 5 languages in my upcoming game, hopefully it will boost sales up!

Thanks for the info!
Roy.

IsabelleK

Very interesting. Worth checking it out

viking

Do you ship different language versions on the different AppStores around the world, or do you give the player the option to change language inside a menu in the game?

wpaten

Also don't forget the most important thing to translate for the Itunes App Store...Your Keywords. Since the description is not searchable, keywords are all you have.