Apple lists ~130 App Store countries. Two of them don't actually work.

Apple publishes a list of App Store storefront country codes. We tested every single one against the live store instead of trusting the list, and two of them quietly don't return anything.

The problem with trusting a list

A storefront ID being present in Apple's published catalog is not the same claim as "searching in that storefront actually returns results." Endpoints get deprecated, storefronts get merged, regions get folded into others — and none of that necessarily shows up as a documentation update.

If you build a rank tracker (or any tool) that just iterates the published list, you inherit whatever is silently broken in it. The failure mode is worse than an error: it's an empty result set that looks exactly like "this app doesn't rank here," when the real answer is "this storefront doesn't work at all."

How we actually verified it

130 candidate storefronts, each checked three independent ways:

1. Autocomplete hints — does the storefront's search-suggestion endpoint return anything for a common term?
2. Language-code acceptance — does the lookup endpoint accept the storefront's expected language code?
3. Country-code acceptance — does the lookup endpoint accept the storefront's country code specifically (not /search, which has its own separate rate-limiting behavior that can falsely zero out working countries under load)?

A storefront has to pass on this independent evidence, not on being present in Apple's list. 128 passed. 2 did not — no error message, just empty where content should have been.

Why this is the boring, necessary part

This is not a glamorous finding. It's a data-plumbing check that most tools in this category skip, because checking it costs three separate API calls per country and the payoff is invisible until something breaks. But a silent gap in a catalog you didn't build yourself is a worse failure than a smaller, honestly-scoped catalog — because you can't see the edges of a gap you don't know exists.

The full breakdown of which storefronts are covered, and the exact three-endpoint method, is here: App Store storefront country codes, verified.

If your own tooling loops over a country list without checking whether the endpoint actually answers, it's worth spending an afternoon running the same three checks. Storelift publishes exactly which 128 storefronts it measures, and why the other 2 aren't in that list — not "everywhere," a list you can see the edges of.