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App Store Says My Non-English App is in English

By Kee Nethery — January 12, 2016

App Store Says My Non-English App is in English

The App Store looks in your app for .lproj folders and uses those to see what languages your app supports. It does not matter what you tell the App Store, it looks inside the app to determine which languages your app supports. Without an .lproj folder the store typically defaults to English.

A properly named empty folder in your source code is all it takes to have the App Store know the language of your app.

There are several formats for naming the folder that indicates your app’s language:

  1. <ISO 639-1 two letter language code>.lproj

    For example, en.lproj indicates generic English, fr.lproj generic French, ja.lproj Japanese, and ko.lproj is Korean.

  2. <ISO 639-2 three letter language code>.lproj

    For example, eng.lproj indicates generic English.

  3. <ISO 639-1 or 639-2 language code>-<iso 3166-1 two letter region designator>.lproj

    For example, en-AU.lproj to indicate Australian English or fr-CA.lproj for Canadian French.

  4. <ISO 639-1 or 639-2 language code>-<iso 15924 four letter script code>.lproj

    For example, zh-Hant.lproj for Traditional Chinese or zh-Hans.lproj for Simplified Chinese.

For the App Store to correctly report the language of your app, there needs to be a properly named .lproj folder. An app supporting multiple languages will have an .lproj folder for each language.

The following links provide extensive lists of the ISO codes referenced above:

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