App Name Generator

What the app name generator does

You are building an app and it needs a name.

This gives you names to work from. Pull a batch and start crossing things out.

And before you get attached to one, it is worth knowing that a lot of the decision has already been taken away from you, by a rule change in 2017, and that the constraint everybody optimises for is not the one that matters.

How to use it

Pull a big batch and press Generate. Copy takes them somewhere you can test them properly, which matters more here than the store listing suggests.

Apple decided how long your app name would be, in June 2017

Your app name gets thirty characters. That is it. That is the whole allowance.

And it has not always been thirty. It has been cut, twice, in living memory, and watching the numbers move tells you exactly what was happening in the store.

It started at 255 characters.

Two hundred and fifty five. That is not a name, that is a paragraph. And people used all of it.

In September 2016, Apple cut it to fifty. And here is the number that tells you everything about what had been going on: more than a quarter of the top apps had to change their names to comply.

Not a handful of spammers on page nine. A quarter of the top of the store.

Then in June 2017, with iOS 11, Apple cut it again, to thirty, and added a separate thirty character subtitle underneath. The rule went into the App Store Review Guidelines and it has been thirty ever since.

Google Play went the same way for the same reasons.

So the shape of every app name you have seen in the last decade was set by a platform policy, not by branding. Thirty characters is not a design principle anybody arrived at. It is a number Apple picked to stop people doing something.

What app names looked like before that

What were they stopping? Keyword stuffing. And it was completely rational, which is why everyone did it.

Apple's search weighted words in the app name more heavily than words in the dedicated keywords field. The keywords field is a hundred characters. The name was two hundred and fifty five, and worth more per word.

So the name stopped being a name. It became a search query you were pre-answering.

App names looked like this: a real name, then a dash, then everything the developer could think of that somebody might type. Life management. Diary. Tracker. Log. Planner. Journal. Habit. Mood. Symptom. On and on until the field ran out.

They were unreadable, and it did not matter, because nobody was reading them. The name existed to be indexed, not to be looked at. And the phone truncated the whole thing on screen anyway, so the user only ever saw the first few words followed by a row of dots, which is the strangest part of it. The store was full of names whose entire back half no human being ever saw. It was written for the algorithm and nobody else.

The end came from an unglamorous direction. Apple was pushing search ads, and a trimmed keyword-stuffed title in an ad slot looks appalling and converts badly. Whatever the mix of motives, the effect was one rule change killing an entire naming style overnight.

And you can date it. The apps with a dash and four keywords after it are pre-2017 or made by somebody who has not read the guidelines. It is a fossil layer. You can look at a store listing and place it in time by the punctuation.

The limit that actually matters is not in the rules

Everybody optimises for the thirty. Almost nobody optimises for the real one.

Because your app name does not live in the App Store. It lives on a home screen, under an icon, in a space about as wide as the icon itself.

And that space is roughly a dozen characters.

Go and look at your own phone. Not at the store. At the screen you actually see forty times a day. Count the labels that have been cut off. Some of them are apps you have had for years and you have never seen the full name of.

So the thirty character allowance is a bit of a trap. You can spend all thirty. You can fit a name and a small descriptive phrase. And then it lands on a home screen and gets cut to the first dozen and a full stop, and the descriptive phrase you agonised over is gone forever from the only surface that matters.

The store listing is a shop window. Somebody looks at it once, for eight seconds, in their life. The home screen label is what they read every single day for years.

Which means the actual naming problem is not thirty. It is: what survives being cut in half?

And the answer is a short compound word. Which is exactly why the modern app store looks the way it does, and why every list of app names, including this one, is full of two words welded together with no space between them. Nobody chose that style. It is what fits.

Taking an app name apart

Look at what these are made of. AnchorNest. AmberBox. AuraBoard. AnchorPing.

Every one is two morphemes, jammed together, with a capital showing the seam.

And the two halves are doing completely different jobs.

The first half is concrete and physical. Anchor. Amber. Aura. Nest. These are things you could photograph. They exist to carry a feeling, and the feeling is doing the branding, and none of it says a word about what the app does.

The second half is a container. Base, Box, Deck, List, Board, Nest, Verse, Ping, Jar, Mate. These are almost interchangeable and that is the point. They are not describing your app either. They are announcing that a thing holds other things, which is what nearly every app is.

So the formula is: a noun with a mood, plus a noun with a shape. Neither one says what the product does.

Which turns out to be legally sensible as well as practically necessary, because in trademark terms a name that describes your product is the weakest kind of name you can have and the hardest to protect. AnchorNest describes nothing. That is not a failure of the name. That is the name doing its job.

And the CamelCase is not decoration. It is a repair. Domains have no spaces, so anchornest.com is one lump, and the capital is what stops a reader having to work out where the word breaks. It is a hyphen that costs no characters.

One thing worth knowing: the capital only exists for humans. The computer does not see it. Domains have no case, app store search does not care, and the moment your name becomes a URL the capital is gone. It works on a poster and on a business card and nowhere else.

Where this list came from

Nothing clever, and that is on purpose.

The list was built by hand, each entry weighed on its own, built on the compound shape described above and kept short enough to survive a home screen. Each press of Generate draws at random, and a batch never repeats an entry.

It all happens locally, on your own machine, and none of it is sent anywhere.

Before you ship it

Put it on your own home screen first. Before anything else. Make a shortcut, name it, look at it. This takes two minutes and it is the only test that simulates the thing your user will actually experience. If it gets cut in a way that changes the word, you have found out now instead of after launch.

Search the store before you love it. Somebody has it, or something close enough that you will spend your life being the other one. And do not just search the exact name, search the first half of it, because that is what people will remember.

Check the trademark, not just availability. The store accepting your name means nothing about whether you are allowed to use it. Apple is not checking anyone's rights and their approval is not permission. This is the step people skip and then hear about in year two.

Do not put keywords in the name. It looks like a free win and it is not any more. The subtitle field exists for exactly this and it is where that material is supposed to go. A name with a dash and a keyword list in it reads as an app from 2015 and it is telling every developer who sees it that you have not read the rules since then.

Say it out loud to somebody who has not seen it written. Compounds are ambush-prone. Two innocent words can produce a third one when the space disappears, and you will not spot it because you know where the seam is and nobody else does.

We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice. It is the shape of the problem, so you know what to ask somebody who is.

Questions people ask

How long can an app name be?

Thirty characters on the App Store, and there is a separate thirty character subtitle. It used to be 255, then 50, then it was cut to 30 in June 2017 with iOS 11. Google Play landed in the same place.

Why did Apple make it shorter?

To stop keyword stuffing. The name was weighted heavily in search, so developers filled 255 characters with search terms. When Apple first cut it to fifty, more than a quarter of the top apps had to rename, which tells you how widespread it was.

Should I put keywords in my app name?

No. That is what the subtitle and the keywords field are for now. Cramming them into the name looks dated, wastes the characters that matter most, and will not do what it used to do.

How much of my name shows on the home screen?

Roughly a dozen characters, and then it cuts. This is the constraint almost nobody designs for, and it is the one your user meets every day. The store listing they see once.

Does CamelCase matter?

Only to people. It helps a reader find the word break on a poster or a card. Domains have no case and search does not care, so never rely on it to carry meaning.

Should the name say what the app does?

For being found, a little. For owning it, no. A name that describes the product is the weakest kind of trademark there is, and you only have thirty characters, so spending them on description costs you the part that people remember.

References

1. App Store Optimization: App Name, Subtitle and Keywords. Apptamin. https://www.apptamin.com/blog/app-store-optimization-aso-app-name-and-keywords/
2. App Store reduces the title from 255 to 50 to 30 characters limit in 2017. Phiture ASO Stack. https://phiture.com/asostack/app-store-introduces-50-character-limit-of-app-names-138477cbf92b/
3. The effect of the App Store 30-character limit on app names. MDPI. https://www.mdpi.com/2813-2203/5/1/3/html
4. App name length in App Store Connect. Apple Developer Forums. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/91722