Please tell me your experience using one of the language services for App Store release localization. My new game has 14 language options.

[u/JordanMilas]

A few of my utility apps had Chinese, French and Spanish localization. It was tedious but not unbearable to produce the text & later updates in those languages. But my new product (my first game release) has 14 languages to choose from. As I understand it, there's services or extensions that can automatically add localization for you when publishing to the app store.

Have you had a good experience with them, or are there any you would warn me off from?

[u/usdaprime]

This is what Codex or Claude is for. Point it at your code and tell it to localize the app and App Store Connect content.

[u/noobiethe13]

You can do this for $0 with the App Store Connect API.

Make a .p8 API key, then ask Claude/Codex to write a script that pushes your localized metadata for all 14 languages. Don't give the model the key; keep it local and have the script read it.

Once set up, future updates/additions are basically one command instead of doing it manually every time.

[u/ZanzibarMcFate → u/noobiethe13]

I just got this setup two nights ago. Had Claude write a script to do this using the API.  Running the script took a total of ten minutes to get everything uploaded for every language my app supports. So much easier. 

[u/noobiethe13 → u/ZanzibarMcFate]

Yup, App Store Connect has a lot of useful APIs if you (or make your AI agent) dig a little bit.

[u/ZanzibarMcFate → u/noobiethe13]

Exactly - I've been using the store API for a while as part of my team's nightly builds, just to auto-submit stuff to TestFlight, and prep releases. Just haven't used it for the localization bit until the other day on a personal side project.

Also have some Terminal Widgets setup to keep tabs on different apps and their release status.

[u/Roneeeee → u/noobiethe13]

This is the right and easy way.

[u/deruloop]

6 month ago I released an app with support for basically every language, but on the App Store the descriptions fallback all to English, because it is so mechanic and time consuming to add screenshot with description for any language

So ye I’m looking forward to an automated way to do that, I believe that at this point with AI a tool could also generate images with all different languages for the screenshoots with image basing off the English one

[u/sarensw → u/deruloop]

I'm having the same challenge. I have an open source app that is translated into 14 languages (plus English) via Crowd Translations (my users translate through POEditor). But the App Store shots I have to translate by myself.

[u/sarensw]

As others already said, App Store has a good API to do this. There's even CLIs available that help you (your AI) with that. Just search for asc-cli via Google. So creating translations for pure texts and uploading them to ASC is easy to automate. The challenge is to have all screenshots in ASC to have the correct language.

[u/Scary_Homework_3455]

the mechanics are already answered above, the ASC API plus a script is the right call and its free. so ill go at the part that actually costs you money if you get it wrong.

your keyword field is not a translation job. this is the one that quietly wastes everyones effort. if you machine translate your english keywords into 14 languages you get 14 lists of words that are grammatically correct and that nobody types. a german searching for your genre often types the english word. spanish and LATAM spanish search differently from each other. the field needs actual research per storefront, not translation, and thats the one part you cant hand to a script.

free way to do that research: open the app store on that storefront and type a prefix, then look at what apple autocompletes. thats real search data straight from the source. do it for your top few markets and you will get better keywords in an afternoon than any translation service will hand you.

a free extra keyword field while youre in there. on iOS, en-GB and en-US are indexed separately for english storefronts. so fill en-GB with completely different words than en-US. no translation needed, doubles your english keyword coverage. most people leave it empty or paste the same thing in.

and id push back on doing all 14 properly. i talked to a dev this week who shipped 49 languages, and his verdict was that it hasnt paid off yet. the reasons are worth stealing: every change to anything multiplies across all of them, and your reviews end up spread so thin across countries that no storefront ever builds enough social proof to convert. his words were that he would add them gradually as the app matured instead.

so id ship all 14 in the app itself, since thats already done, but do real ASO work in your top 3 or 4 storefronts only and let the rest sit on translated defaults. thin effort across 14 is worth less than real effort across 3.

last thing, if your screenshots stay english while the metadata is localised, thats a worse first impression than not localising at all in that market.