Going Global: A Guide to Checking Your App’s Google Play Store Listing Translations From Anywhere

Have you ever wondered what users around the globe see when they visit your Android apps’ Google Play store listing? Well, it depends on their country of origin and their locale settings. In most cases, country of origin means the IP of the visitor and the locale is the language (for the scope of what we are discussing here) that the OS or the specific browser defines.

Since I’m located in Greece 🇬🇷 ☀️, and my browser is in English, visiting https://play.google.com/store/apps will bring the English version of the Greek Play Store. This means that I get to see the top paid/free/grossing apps in Greece, as well as other regional content.

But why should you care what your app listing looks like from a different country or language? There are numerous reasons why someone would want to “fake” his origin and locale at any given time.

• Perhaps your app has many translations in the store listing and you want to check out your localized content.
• Perhaps your app is not available for the entire world and you want to check out what shows up in the countries that you are not listed when someone searches for your app.

Regional content

Now if I wanted to check out what the French version of the Play store website looks like (aka what would someone from France see), all I need to do is add the request parameter gl=fr to the URL. If you go to https://play.google.com/store/apps?gl=fr you can now check the top-selling apps at this moment in France 🇫🇷

And if you scroll down you will see that Google Play is displaying French-related content (in English because this is my default locale)

There is no official documentation (at least none that I could find) on any Play Store guide, but, according to Google's own Programmable Search API

The gl parameter value is a two-letter country code. For WebSearch results, the gl parameter boosts search results whose country of origin matches the parameter value. See the Country Codes section for a list of valid values.

Specifying a gl parameter value in WebSearch requests should improve the relevance of results. This is particularly true for international customers and, even more specifically, for customers in English-speaking countries other than the United States.

Localized content

To see the page in French, according to the same documentation all I have to do is add the hl=fr request parameter.

The hl parameter specifies the interface language (host language) of your user interface. To improve the performance and the quality of your search results, you are strongly encouraged to set this parameter explicitly.

See the Interface Languages section of Internationalizing Queries and Results Presentation for more information and Supported Interface Languages for a list of supported languages.

The URL will look like https://play.google.com/store/apps?gl=fr&hl=fr and it will show the French Play Store in French.

And this can be verified by looking at the footer of the page.

Now that we have a way to fake our location without resorting to the usage of a VPN service, let’s have a look at what our own apps' listing would look like.

App presence

Let’s look at another cool use case for these parameters.

During the past two years, we were developing the trading.com website and mobile applications for Android and iOS. The application is only available in the US market for now. This means that no one from other places of the world could see the store listing without a VPN. This might seem like a trivial problem but when it comes to non-IT people (i.e. marketing, operations, etc) the VPN solution is not always a trivial one.

When a user from France (aka gl=fr) searches for trading.com in Google Play he will see a list of similar apps because the app is not available in France.

🇫🇷 https://play.google.com/store/search?q=trading.com&c=apps&gl=fr.

On the other hand, when searching for trading.com from the USA (aka gl=us) the outcome is completely different because the app is available in that region.

🇺🇸 https://play.google.com/store/search?q=trading.com&c=apps&gl=us

Just like that, using a small set of query parameters, we were able to preview our app in multiple translations and see how (and if) our app is ranked in play stores around the world, without using any VPN service.