How to localize App Store and Google Play screenshots

Updated October 2026, from Apple’s and Google’s own documentation.

The short version
  • Neither store translates the text in your images. Without screenshots of its own, a language shows your primary language’s screenshots, even when the description around them is translated.
  • Translating the headlines is the quick win. Capturing your app’s own screens in each language is the next step, for languages your app supports.
  • The App Store has 50 localizations. Upload each one’s screenshots from the language menu in App Store Connect, or all at once with fastlane.

What people see if you don’t localize them

App Store: when you add a language in App Store Connect, its screenshots start out as your primary language’s, along with every other field except the description and keywords. Someone in Germany can read a German description above English screenshots. Where no localization matches a customer’s language, the App Store picks the closest one, or your primary language.

Google Play: a language with translated text but no graphics of its own shows the default language’s screenshots and feature graphic. For languages you haven’t translated at all, Play can offer people an automatic translation of your listing text, but not of the words in your images.

Which languages to start with

  • The languages your app already supports. Screenshots in the same language as the app set the right expectation, and you can capture real screens for them.
  • The default languages of the countries you sell in. Apple’s list of App Store localizations shows each storefront’s default language and the others it supports: Japan shows Japanese by default (with English as an option), Switzerland German (with English, French and Italian).
  • English variants (UK, Australia, Canada) are separate App Store localizations. Copying your US text is fine, but check spellings like color and colour.

Capturing your app in each language

  • iOS: run the app in another language from Xcode (Scheme → Run → Options → App Language), or pass -AppleLanguages (de) -AppleLocale de_DE as launch arguments. fastlane snapshot automates it: it runs your UI tests in every language and device you list and saves the screenshots in a folder per language (en-US/, de-DE/, …).
  • Android: fastlane screengrab does the same with your instrumentation tests, for every locale you list.
  • Fill the app with sample content that fits each market: local names, currencies, dates and places.
  • Clean the status bar while you capture: xcrun simctl status_bar booted override --time 9:41 in the iOS Simulator (fastlane snapshot’s override_status_bar option does it for you), or System UI demo mode on Android.

Translating the headlines

  • Translate the idea, not the words. A headline that works in English can read stiffly word for word. Give your translator, or the AI, the app’s description and what each screenshot shows.
  • Expect longer text. Translations from English often run longer, and a headline that fit on two lines may need three. Shorter headlines in the original leave room.
  • Check the fonts. Many display fonts only cover Latin letters. Look at every language before you export, especially Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and the other Indian scripts, Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
  • Right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu on the App Store) should read and align from the right.
  • Have a native speaker read the ones that matter most. Machine translation is a fine first draft, and a quick review catches the awkward lines.

Uploading each language

App Store Connect: open the app version, choose the language from the menu at the top right, and drop that language’s screenshots into Previews and Screenshots. With fastlane, put them in fastlane/screenshots/<language>/ and run fastlane deliver, which tells iPhone and iPad screenshots apart by their pixel size.

Google Play Console: open the store listing, choose Manage translations to add languages, then add each language’s graphics. With fastlane, they go in fastlane/metadata/android/<language>/images/phoneScreenshots/ for fastlane supply. Play’s language codes differ from Apple’s in places (Apple’s Spanish for Mexico is Play’s Latin American Spanish, es-419), and Odia has no Play listing language. The Google Play requirements guide has the sizes and rules.

Doing it in ShotPass

One ShotPass project holds every language, so the design stays the same and only the words and screens change:

  • Add any of the 50 App Store languages and switch between them in the toolbar. Each language can have its own screenshots, and uses the primary language’s until it does.
  • Drop a folder of language folders, named by store code as fastlane snapshot writes them (en-US/, de-DE/) or by language (English/, German/), and every language’s slides fill at once.
  • Translate the whole project into a language in one go with AI translation (a 7-day pass includes 90 of these), or for free: export the text as a CSV or copy it with instructions for ChatGPT or Claude, then paste the translations back.
  • Translations that run long shrink slightly to keep the original’s line count, and any that still don’t fit are listed. Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu are set right to left.
  • Export every language at once, in a folder per language and size, or in the folders fastlane uploads from, with Play’s language codes (see the fastlane guide).

Sizes for each device are in the screenshot sizes guide. Designing is free; a pass for $5 removes the watermark and includes AI translation for a week.

Start designing

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