Tips for naming your mobile app or game

Your app or game name is one of the most difficult, but also most important, decisions you will make.

The Stats

I analyzed 8000 apps in the US App Store top charts.

Word Count Character Count Max 38 254 Min 1 2 Avg 5.5 36.0 Median 4 27

The results varied greatly.

From names with 1 word and 2 letters like “QQ” to the crazy with 38 words and 254 characters – “Voice Translator with speech recognition – Does translate understand and speak 29 languages like Spanish English Russian French Czech or German – Dictate and hear the app read its translation to study or exchange with foreign speakers like an interpreter”

Word Count

Looking at the distribution of the number of words used.

Most apps clustered towards using less words. With 2 & 3 words being the most popular.

Over 50% of apps use 4 words or less.

Character Count

Similarly looking at the distribution of the number of characters used.

Peaking at 12 characters, the majority of apps use less than 30 characters in their app name.

Common Words

The top 10 words used were:

Word Count and 1291 for 1172 free 638 pro 485 the 472 with 355 to 341 your 307 app 299

Ignoring stop words like “and”, “for”, “the” etc gives:

Word Count free 638 pro 485 tracker 266 weather 253 music 219 photo 213 video 203 mobile 199 news 189 iphone 155

The top 50 words were:

“free, pro, tracker, weather, music, photo, video, mobile, news, iphone, calculator, gps, guide, manager, player, instagram, editor, best, edition, live, new, map, text, radio, maker, daily, videos, camera, bible, hd, voice, game, photos, get, plus, phone, emoji, maps, scanner, english, dictionary, games, google, keyboard, calendar, baby, sleep, audio, reader, world”

Plotting it on a word cloud:

Separators

Many apps use a separator, e.g. “Flipboard: Your Social News Magazine” and “Pandora – Free Music & Radio“.

So I dug into what is used.

Has a – separator 2622 Has a : separator 578

32% of apps use a – separator in their app name.

Categories

Almost 20% of apps used the name of the category in their app name.

And when you look at a category like Music 50% of the top 200 apps had music in the name, or Weather where 62% have weather in their name.

It pays to be descriptive and clear.

The Tips

When naming your mobile app think about:

Choose a name that is 2-6 words long.

Be descriptive and include your main keyword / category (photo, music, video, news etc)

Consider using a – to separate your name and pitch.

If you have a longer name consider how it will wrap on different devices.

Call your app “Free Weather Tracker Pro” (just kidding)

Names I Love