RTL and Asian Market ASO Considerations

Right-to-left affects more than text alignment

Arabic and Hebrew are read right-to-left, and Apple's App Store interface mirrors accordingly for RTL locales — navigation elements, layout flow, and reading order all flip. This has real consequences for screenshots that include any UI chrome, directional arrows, or ordered step sequences: a screenshot that reads correctly left-to-right will read backwards to an RTL user if it isn't specifically designed for that direction.

Since screenshot caption text has been OCR-indexed as a ranking signal since June 2025, this isn't purely a design and conversion concern anymore. RTL-locale screenshots need correctly rendered, properly directional Arabic or Hebrew captions to get the same indexing benefit an English-locale screenshot gets, not a mirrored image with an untranslated or incorrectly rendered caption.

Japanese and Chinese: script mixing and vertical text

Japanese text in ordinary use mixes three scripts: kanji, hiragana, and katakana, and a single concept sometimes has valid search candidates in more than one script, particularly for loanword-derived terms that get searched in katakana even when a native kanji equivalent exists.

Both Japanese and Chinese can be rendered vertically as well as horizontally, though horizontal rendering is standard for App Store metadata and most app UI. Where a screenshot or preview asset uses vertical text as a stylistic choice, confirm it still reads correctly and isn't mistaken for a rendering error by users unfamiliar with the convention in a software context.

Chinese requires a further decision most Western-market ASO doesn't: Simplified Chinese for mainland China versus Traditional Chinese for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. These aren't the same character set rendered differently — running one through a script converter changes the characters but not necessarily the underlying vocabulary, which has diverged after decades of separate usage.

Copy conventions differ independent of script

Japanese app descriptions and product pages tend toward detailed, feature-by-feature copy, a real contrast to the concise, benefit-led style that performs well in US-market listings. This is a market convention, not a translation quality issue, and it applies to promotional text and description even though neither is indexed for search.

Formality register also matters more visibly in Japanese and Korean app copy than in most Western markets — polite, formal phrasing is the safer default for a general-audience app, with more casual register reserved deliberately for youth-oriented categories.