Similar languages when submitting to Apple's AppStore

Question

I am uploading a new App which is localized in 10 languages to the Apple AppStore.

Apple offers several languages with country specific options such as

• Canadian French
• Mexican Spanish
• Brazilian Portuguese

We have set up localizations for French, Spanish and Portuguese.

On the iPhone, an App defaults to the closest language available. For example, an iPhone set to "Brazilian Portuguese" will use the regular Portuguese localization instead of the English default localization.

Is it the same on the AppStore? Do we need to also set "Mexican Spanish" or will customers from Mexico default to Spanish (instead of the defaulting to English)?

edit:

To clarify, this is not about whether we should localize to these dialects (we already decided against that when making the app), but whether the store page shown to the customer will be displayed in the closest dialect or english.

For example, will a Mexican user automatically see the Spanish version (the closest language) or the default language (English)?

Answer 1

I can confirm that the closest available language is selected by the App Store.

For example in the Mexican App Store if you have Spanish set up but not Mexican Spanish, Spanish will show up. This app has Spanish activated on iTunes but not Mexican Spanish and everything is in Spanish on the Mexican App Store. https://itunes.apple.com/mx/app/id502222888

The language that is displayed on the App Store depends also on the user's language settings since they set the language query parameter. The URL format used by Apple with the language query parameter is: https://itunes.apple.com/tw/app/id502222888?l=zh where tw is Taiwan and l=zh is the Chinese language.

The language query parameter is not always used.

For example in Germany, even if you set the another language via the query parameter it will be ignored and the German language will show up since it is the only language for that location: https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/id502222888?l=fr

While in Canada that has both English or French, you can use the language query parameter: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/id502222888?l=fr

Answer 2

To answer my own question: No, Apple does not automatically choose the closest language on the AppStore.

Here is an example of the Mexican AppStore using English despite standard Spanish being present:

Answer 3

Let's start with Spanish. As far as I know Spanish (Mexico) is considered International Spanish, which is fairly similar to English (USA).

I don't know about French, so I might be wrong here but I believe French (France) would be perfectly understandable by the Canadians.

As for Portuguese... Well, in this case you did something that I believe should be the other way round. I read on the Internet that Portuguese government (?) recently pass a reform so that regular Portuguese would be similar in terms of grammar with Brazilian Portuguese. You see as Brazil is much bigger country, Brazilian version is much more common. Therefore I don't think it is OK to use regular Portuguese in Brazil (there might be some problems) but it is probably just about right to use Brazilian Portuguese in Portugal.

There is also the case of Chinese. As in Simplified vs Traditional. If you ever going to localize your application into Chinese (not the easiest thing to do), Traditional is the one to be used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao whereas Simplified is the one they use in China (mainland) as well as in Singapore.
It would be very inappropriate to confuse them (i.e. try to sell Simplified version to the Taiwanese).