App Store title length: the 30-character limit, in practice

“30 characters” is not the same as JavaScript’s `.length`

Apple’s own documentation states the app name (App Name) can be up to 30 characters, and thesubtitle can also be up to 30 characters (see Sources). That “character” is the unit a person perceives as one character — it doesn’t always match the count of UTF-16 code units JavaScript strings use internally (string.length).

The most common mismatch comes from emoji and certain symbols. Many emoji are represented as a surrogate pair — two UTF-16 code units — so counting with .length makes a single visible emoji count as two. ASO Lens’s title-length logic (the charLength function in src/core/text/tokenize.ts) avoids this by expanding the string through a code-point iterator ([...s]) before counting.

Combining characters (for example, cases where a base character and a combining diacritic are represented as separate code points) are a separate concern: even code-point counting can, in principle, diverge from the number of visible “characters” a person would perceive (grapheme clusters). ASO Lens’s implementation counts by code point and does not additionally normalize to grapheme clusters. What we can confirm here is specifically that it counts by code point — nothing stronger than that.

How ASO Lens scores title length

ASO Lens’s scoring logic (src/core/scoring/rules/metadata.ts) uses that same charLength to count the title, scoring 15–30 characters as full marks, 1–30 as partial, and 0 or over-30 as zero. The subtitle is scored the same way, with 20+ characters as full marks. This threshold combines Apple’s actual limit (30) with ASO Lens’s own heuristic that titles which use most of the available space (without exceeding it) tend to work better — Apple itself does not state that 15+ characters is the recommended minimum.

Search-result listings truncate the tail

In App Store search results and category listings, an app name’s tail can be visually truncated because of limited display space. That means “can be registered up to 30 characters” and “all 30 characters are always visible on screen” are two different things. What you can register and what a user actually sees need to be reasoned about separately. Placing the words that matter most (your brand name, or the primary term you want to be found for) earlier in the title makes them more likely to survive truncation.

Brand name vs. keywords is a tradeoff, not a formula

Fitting both your brand name and the keywords you want to be found for into 30 characters usually means giving something up. There isn’t one universally correct answer here — it depends on the app and the situation.

• Prioritizing the brand name makes it easier for existing users, or people who heard about the app through word of mouth or ads, to find it — but narrows the title’s contribution to keyword coverage (what ASO Lens’s coverage logic calls the “title” source).
• Prioritizing keywords widens what the title covers in search, but shortening or dropping the brand name can work against branded search (users searching for the app by its own name) and brand recognition more broadly.

ASO Lens’s keyword-coverage logic (src/core/keywords/coverage.ts) records, for each tracked keyword, whether it’s covered by the title, the subtitle, or the keywords field — as three separate sources. Rather than trying to fit every keyword into the title alone, it’s more useful to think of title, subtitle, and the keywords field together as one shared budget to allocate across.

Summary

An App Store title tops out at 30 characters — but that count is about what a person reads, and can diverge from a naive programmatic character count, especially with emoji. Separately, what you can register and what’s actually visible in a search listing are two different things. There’s no single correct split between brand name and keywords; it’s a tradeoff best reasoned about across the title, subtitle, and keywords field together, not the title in isolation.