Google Play Screenshot Localization: Translating Your Play Store Screenshots

A user browsing Google Play with their phone set to German gets a German interface: German buttons, German category names, German reviews. Your screenshots sit in the middle of that page. If they're the only English thing on it, they're the part that looks like it wasn't made for that user.

This post is about the Play side specifically: how the Play Console's per-language listings work, why Android's device-type rules make localization multiply faster than you'd expect, and how to produce every language in one export. If you're shipping on both stores, the iOS half is in App Store Screenshot Localization.

The Play Console Keeps a Listing Per Language

Adding a language to your app doesn't just translate your description. The Play Console keeps a store listing per language you add, and each one carries its own graphic assets — screenshots included.

So localization on Play isn't a setting you flip. It's a set of empty slots that appear the moment you add a language, and stay empty until you upload something into them. Whatever a language's listing doesn't have, it falls back to showing your default one — which means every non-English market is looking at the set you built for English.

Android's Device Types Make It Multiply Faster

This is where Play differs from the App Store in a way that matters for localization.

Play organizes screenshots by device type — phone, 7" tablet, 10" tablet — and, as covered in the Google Play screenshot size guide, Play does not auto-fill tablet screenshots from phone screenshots. There's no downscaling safety net. A tablet set is a set you produce yourself.

Stack that against languages and the arithmetic gets ugly:

And a "set" isn't one file. Play allows 2–8 screenshots per device type, with 2 phone screenshots the minimum to publish — the counts are in Google Play Screenshot Requirements. Four slides across three device types in five languages is 60 PNGs.

The export count isn't even the painful part. Rewording one headline six months from now means walking back through all 60 to keep them consistent — or accepting that they've drifted apart.

The First Screenshot Is Doing the Most Work

On Play, the first screenshot is what shows in search results and in the featured carousel (size guide). That's the one slide a user in another market is most likely to see, and often the only one.

If exactly one thing in your listing gets translated, it should be the headline on slide one. In practice it's easier to translate all of them than to maintain a listing where only the first slide is localized.

Play's Rules Don't Relax for Translations

A localized upload is still an upload, and it goes through the same validation as your English one:

• 24-bit PNG or JPEG, no alpha. Transparency is rejected — flatten onto a solid background.
• Every side between 320 px and 3840 px, longest side no more than 2× the shortest.
• 1080×1920 (9:16) is the safe phone size and clears the promotional threshold — at least 1080 px on the shorter side, 16:9 or 9:16.

All of that is in Google Play Screenshot Requirements, and it applies per file, per language. A translated set that was exported at a different size than your English set will fail the same way an English one would.

The practical consequence: translating is not a step you do after exporting. Whatever produces your English PNGs at exact Play dimensions has to produce the German ones the same way.

What Gets Translated (And What Doesn't)

Worth being precise, because this is where localization tools differ:

Translated: the headline and subtitle you write on each slide — the marketing copy layered around the device frame.

Not translated: the pixels inside the app screenshot you upload. That image is passed through untouched. If your app's own UI is showing English inside the frame, it stays English.

If you want the UI inside the frame localized too, that's your app's job, not the screenshot tool's: switch the emulator to the target language, capture a fresh screenshot, and use that as the slide's image.

Doing It in One Export

Screenshot Maker treats language as another axis of the export, alongside slides and device sizes:

Step 1: Build your slides once Pick an Android size, upload your capture, write the headline and subtitle, pick a background. If you haven't done this part, How to Make Google Play Screenshots Without Photoshop walks through it.

Step 2: Pick your languages Select the languages you want. The headline and subtitle on every selected slide get translated.

Step 3: Export One export produces a full, correctly-sized Play-ready set for each language.

When you export more than one language, the ZIP has a top-level folder per language — base/ for your original copy, then one folder per translation — and inside each is the usual folder per device size (1080×1920, 1200×1920, and so on). So a single download gives you the phone set and both tablet sets, in every language, at exact Play dimensions.

Translation is platform-independent: it works exactly the same on Play Store sizes as on App Store sizes.

Supported Languages

Seven. The folders are named by App Store Connect locale code, since that's the naming this tool uses across both stores:

One thing to be aware of on Play: Google Play maintains its own list of language identifiers, and it is not formatted identically to Apple's. Don't try to match the folder name to a Play identifier character-for-character. Match by language instead — add the language you want in the Play Console, then upload the screenshots from that language's folder into it. The native name column above is there to make that mapping unambiguous.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are not supported yet — those scripts need a bundled webfont that hasn't shipped, and rendering them without it would produce broken screenshots rather than translated ones.

Check Length Before You Upload

Translated copy changes length. German and Russian in particular tend to run longer than the English you wrote, and a headline that fits one line in English can wrap to three.

Two things to look at before you upload. First, does anything overflow or wrap badly? If so, shorten the English source rather than patching each language — editing the original once is faster than fixing seven exports. Second, is the translated headline on slide one still readable at thumbnail size? Slide one is the one that appears in Play search results, so a translation that turned a punchy four-word headline into a dense three-line block has cost you the thing that slide was for.

What It Costs

Translation is part of the $5 one-time purchase. No per-language fee, no subscription — the same $5 that removes the watermark covers localization for both stores. Paid accounts get 10 translate runs per day.

If you're signed in but haven't paid, you get one free run to check the output quality first: one slide into one language, once per account.

Summary

• Google Play keeps a store listing per language, each with its own screenshots; a language you don't fill falls back to your default set
• Play doesn't generate tablet screenshots from phone ones, so localization multiplies across device types as well as languages
• The first screenshot shows in search and the featured carousel — it's the slide translation pays off on first
• Every language's files still have to satisfy Play's format and size rules: opaque PNG or JPEG, 320–3840 px per side, longest side ≤ 2× the shortest
• What gets translated is your headline and subtitle, not the contents of your uploaded screenshot
• Screenshot Maker translates into 7 languages and exports one ready-to-upload folder per language at exact Play dimensions, included in the $5 one-time price