Countries and storefronts

There is no global App Store. Apple runs a separate storefront for every country, and each one is its own search market: its own searches, its own competitors, its own rankings. That is why every screen in ASO Atlas asks you for a country, and why every number you see - popularity, difficulty, rank - is only true for the storefront it was measured in.

Every storefront is its own search market

The same keyword can be a completely different bet depending on where you look:

• Demand differs. "workout planner" is a busy search in the United States and a quiet one in smaller English-speaking markets. The popularity score is measured per storefront for exactly this reason.
• Competition differs. The apps ranking for a phrase in Germany are not the apps ranking for it in Japan. Local apps you have never heard of can own a market, so difficulty is scored against the storefront's actual top results.
• Your rank differs. Ranking #4 in your home market says nothing about where you sit anywhere else. Rank tracking always records position in one specific storefront.

Treat a keyword-country pair as the unit of research. "photo editor" in the US and "photo editor" in Brazil are two different keywords that happen to share a spelling.

Where the country shows up in ASO Atlas

Research supports more than 60 storefronts. Every research page has a country selector next to the search box: pick the storefront, and every score, competitor list and suggestion you get back comes from that market.

A tracked app tracks one storefront at a time. Its keywords, ranks, competitors and opportunities all live in that country. Two things follow from that:

• You can switch a tracked app's country. From the app's page, change the storefront and ASO Atlas re-tracks your keywords there and re-checks every rank. This is the right move when an app was added under the wrong country, or when your real market is not the one you started with. If the app is not published in the target storefront, the switch is rejected. See managing apps for the details.
• You can track the same app in several markets. Add the app again with a different country selected and it becomes a separate tracked app with its own keyword set and rank history. That is deliberate: your US keyword list and your German keyword list should not be the same list.

English travels, local language wins

English keywords work in far more storefronts than you might expect. People search in English in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and much of Asia, so a well-researched English keyword set gives you baseline coverage in many non-English markets.

But the local-language long tail is where localization actually pays. The searcher who types the German or Japanese phrase for "sleep tracker for kids" faces far fewer competitors than the one typing it in English, and converts better because your listing speaks their language. Those phrases never show up in English-market research; you only find them by researching the storefront in its own language.

A practical workflow for going international

1. Validate your home market first. Get your core keyword set ranking and converting in the storefront you know best. International expansion multiplies whatever you have, including mistakes.
2. Research the biggest markets for your category. Run your proven keywords through research in the large storefronts where your category is strong, and compare popularity and difficulty per market. Demand is rarely evenly distributed; most apps find two or three markets that clearly stand out.
3. Localize metadata where the demand shows up. App Store localization gives you separate metadata slots per storefront language: a localized title, subtitle and keyword field that only that market's index reads. Pick the 2-3 markets where research showed real demand, research their local-language long tail, and write native metadata for them. Track the app in each of those markets so you can see the results move.

Spreading thin across twenty storefronts with machine-translated metadata beats doing nothing, but barely. Two or three markets researched and localized properly will outperform it every time.