DEV Community: Shotlingo

Localizing App Store screenshots: a checklist for indie developers

Shotlingo — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 07:54:03 +0000

Your English screenshot headline fits perfectly. Then you translate it, and in German it wraps onto a third line and collides with the device mockup. In Chinese you tightened the box because "Chinese is shorter", and now that one overflows too.

Localized App Store screenshots fail in a few predictable ways. Here is a checklist I use before sending any screenshot set to translation.

1. Measure width, not character count

Character count is the wrong number. What overflows a button is rendered width.

From the expansion dataset we use at ShotLingo (published in full for 41 App Store languages in this table):

German runs about 35% longer than English, in characters and in width.
Finnish, Hungarian, Polish and both Portuguese variants run about 30% longer.
31 of the 41 languages run at least 20% longer than English, so long text is the default, not an edge case.
Chinese Simplified is about 50% shorter in characters but roughly the same width on screen. Japanese and Korean are 40 to 45% shorter in characters and about 5% wider. CJK glyphs are full width, so do not shrink the box for them.

2. Design for the worst case, not for English

If you want one stress test: lay the headline out in German, then check it in Finnish. If both fit, most of the other European locales will too. A layout with only 10% slack is under-built for most of the store.

3. Leave room for right-to-left

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu mirror the layout, and some of them also run long (Arabic and Persian about +25 to +30% in width in the table above). Two risk factors stack: the string is longer and the composition flips. Check the mirrored layout on its own, not just the longer text.

4. Keep metadata limits separate from layout limits

App Store Connect caps the app name and subtitle at 30 characters per locale and promotional text at 170. A German translation of a 26-character English name can exceed 30 and gets rejected for that locale only. Screenshot captions are not capped by App Store Connect, but they have the same problem in a different form: nothing truncates them, they just run past the edge of the overlay. No validator catches it, so it ships in the locale you cannot proofread.

5. One set per storefront, checked per language

Do not eyeball a few languages and assume the rest follow. Render every locale you ship and look at each image at thumbnail size, since that is how most people see it in search results. Look for three things: a third wrapped line, text touching the device frame, and a font size that was auto-shrunk below readable.

6. Make re-doing it cheap

The reason teams skip this checklist is that fixing 15 languages by hand is miserable. Whatever tool you use, you want a single source layout where translated text is auto-fitted per language, so a headline change is one edit, not fifteen. That is what we built ShotLingo for: you design one screenshot set, translate it, and the text is fitted into the layout for each language. You can try it at shotlingo.com.

Quick pre-flight list

Headline tested in German and Finnish.
CJK boxes not shrunk.
RTL locales checked mirrored.
Name and subtitle within 30 characters in every locale.
Every locale rendered and viewed at thumbnail size.
Source layout kept in one place so fixes are one edit.

The numbers above come from our own dataset; the full per-language table is linked in section 1. Questions welcome in the comments.

Letting Claude build my App Store screenshots through an MCP connector

Shotlingo — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 11:57:18 +0000

i got tired of dragging text boxes around for every language, so i connected claude to shotlingo through its mcp connector.

the setup: in claude, settings, connectors, add custom connector, paste https://mcp.shotlingo.com/mcp and sign in. the connector needs a pro, plus or studio plan; uploading to app store connect and importing your live screenshots need plus or studio.

what claude can do with it (tool names from the connector): create_store_set to build a set, set_translations to fill languages, render_screenshot to check a page, start_batch to render the whole set, export_to_app_store to upload.

i wrote up 11 prompts you can paste as they are, one per job (import your live screenshots, translate, fit-check, render, size an a/b test, upload): https://shotlingo.com/blog/claude-mcp-prompts-for-app-store-screenshots/

happy to hear what breaks.

App Store Age Rating 2026: New Questions From Nov 16

Shotlingo — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 06:36:01 +0000

Apple adds Shared Location and Dating and Relationships to the age rating questionnaire on November 16, 2026. What Apple said, the January 12, 2027 deadline, and a checklist.

Read the full article on Shotlingo →