iOS - App description showing incorrect language in App Store

Question

I localised my app via iTunesConnect but it does not show up in App Store. The primary language of my app is English.

When I go to Japanese App Store my app's description is still showing English while other apps show localised language.

In iTunesConnect, after I added a new version, I select Japanese on the top right, typed in Japanese app description, keywords and screenshots.

I also made sure that my phone language is Japanese.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The answer from PapaIII is almost perfect in my opinion, however, I'd like to add some more information.

The language information for the app store is supposed to be retrieved automatically. There is no parameter that you can set directly. It might not be enough to only localize Localizable.strings and InfoPlist.strings but you also need to localize your storyboard files, i.e. LaunchScreen.storyboard and Main.storyboard. I think these are the files where App Store Connect gets its language info from.

Saying that, in my case App Store Connect also ignored all entries from CFBundleLocalizations from Info.plist. Only after I had localized the aforementioned storyboard files, the language information finally showed up correctly in the app store.

Lastly, I would recommend enabling "Use Base Internationalization". However, be aware that Info.plist needs to be localized in a different way and that it should not be moved to the Base.lproj folder. See Build error after I localized Info.plist

Answer 2

This is a tricky one. It is not enough to just add localized description on AppStoreConnect. Apple shows Languages in this section according to the files localized in your app in Xcode.

Facebook example

Easy way to do this is to change "Localization native development region" field in Info.plist file:

Changing development region

IMPORTANT NOTICE: However, this solution is enough only if you don't localize any other files (solution for this is bellow, you must do some extra steps).

You need to open Xcode, select your project in files structure, select Project (not targets) and add the languages you want to be shown there (in your case Japanese). On the following image there are a couple of languages (don't check the "Use base internationalization" checkmark):

Localizations languages

IMPORTANT NOTICE: You must localize at least one file in your target in order to have this information about languages shown on the AppStore (as you are doing this on per target basis, you can have different languages shown for each target, good for white label apps). I usually localize LaunchScreen.storyboard as you usually don't have any text here.

In order to localize storyboard, you need to tap on it and in the right menu tap "Localize..." button:

Localize button

After that, just check the languages you want it to be localized to (in my example German.

Localized storyboard languages list

Answer 3

You may want to check again tomorrow. I found in the past that updates to international app store pages may take up to 24 hour to propagate.