App Store Storefront
An App Store storefront is one country-specific instance of the App Store, each with its own search demand, ranking results, and keyword difficulty — 109 storefronts exist in total.
Apple operates a separate App Store in each country where it is available. Each storefront has its own search index, its own keyword popularity scores, and its own set of apps ranking for each term. A keyword that is hard to rank for in the US might be straightforward in a mid-tier market where fewer apps are competing.
This separation matters most in two scenarios. First, when choosing which markets to localise for: the same keyword might have enough demand to justify a translation in Germany but not in a smaller adjacent market. Second, when looking for opportunities: a keyword blocked in your primary market might be winnable in a secondary market that has not yet attracted as many competing apps.
Storefronts are identified by two-letter ISO country codes (US, GB, JP, BR, DE). Apps submit separate metadata per storefront — you can have a different app name, subtitle, and keyword field for each country, though most apps start by localising into a handful of high-priority markets and expand from there.
The 109 storefronts Apple supports range from very large (US, China, Japan) to very small (Micronesia, Grenada). The smaller storefronts have very low keyword difficulty because few apps are competing for their search results — this makes them useful for testing keyword effectiveness before competing in the major markets.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need different metadata for every App Store storefront?
- No — Apple uses your primary language metadata as a fallback for any storefront you haven't localised. But localising the name, subtitle, and keyword field into the dominant language of a market typically unlocks significantly more search demand than relying on English fallback.
- Which storefronts are worth targeting first?
- Start with your primary market, then add storefronts based on where your users already come from (your App Store analytics show this). After that, target markets where the same keywords have real demand but lower difficulty than your primary market — this is where the effort-to-result ratio is best.
- Are keyword scores different between storefronts for the same keyword?
- Yes, always. Popularity scores reflect local search volume, which varies by language and market size. Difficulty scores reflect the local apps ranking for that term — the competitive landscape in Japan is entirely different from the US for most categories.
Related terms
- Keyword PopularityKeyword popularity is a 0–100 score measuring how often users search for a given term in the App Store, derived from Apple Search Ads demand signals.
- Localization (ASO)ASO localization is the process of writing separate app metadata (name, subtitle, keyword field) in the local language of each target App Store storefront to capture search demand that English-only metadata misses.
- Competing Apps CountThe competing apps count is the number of apps that appear in search results for a given keyword in a specific storefront — a proxy for how saturated that keyword's search results are.
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Put this into practice
Score App Store keywords by popularity and difficulty across 109 storefronts — the numbers behind app store storefront.
Start keyword research