Naming mobile applications and IT products
Why a good ASO name may be unregistrable
The app title has the highest weight for ranking in the App Store — higher than the description, keywords, and subtitle combined. Logic suggests: a name with a keyword that best describes the product's essence should be chosen. 'Step fitness tracker' — seemingly the ideal option for search.
Now let's look at the law. According to Article 1483 of the Russian Civil Code, the main requirement for a trademark is distinctiveness: the name must indicate the manufacturer, not describe the product itself. Fantasy words like 'Yandex' or 'Kodak' are registered without problems. Descriptive phrases like 'Fresh bread' or 'Step fitness tracker' — almost never. It turns out that the better a name works for ASO, the worse it passes registration. This is not a theoretical conflict, but something every other team faces when choosing a name based on advice from articles about App Store Optimization.
A working compromise is a hybrid structure: invent a fantasy or partially neologistic core of the name, and move the descriptive part to the subtitle (subtitle in the App Store) or to the developer name in Google Play, which is also fully indexed there. This way, the brand gets legal protection, and search gets keywords.
How the ranking by name works in practice
The limit on characters in both stores is 30 signs. But the user sees about 15 characters on a smartphone screen, and even fewer on the main iOS screen, around 11. This means that the first words play the decisive role: if the meaning or recognizability appear after the 12-th character, for most users they simply do not exist.
| Parameter | App Store | Google Play |
|---|---|---|
| What is indexed | Name, subtitle, keywords (hidden field) | Name, full description, developer name |
| Name weight in ranking | Highest among all fields | High, but competes with description text |
| Visible part on screen | ~11 characters on main screen | ~15 characters in search results list |
| How localization is determined | By uploaded locales in App Store Connect | By uploaded locales in Play Console |
Separate issue — write the phrase "available in 10 languages" in the description, hoping to boost relevance. Both stores determine in which languages the app is available not by the text, but by the fact of uploaded localizations in the developer console. Characters spent on this are simply wasted.
Legal traps that are not visible at first glance
Checking for a free domain is a habit inherited from web naming, and for apps it is misleading. A free domain says nothing about whether a similar trademark is registered in Rospatent. You need to check the database by Nice classes — for a mobile app, this is usually several classes at once: 09 (software), 42 (software development services, SaaS), and 45 (if the product is related to legal or personal services).
Courts and patent experts, when assessing similarity, look at three features simultaneously:
- phonetic — how the name sounds aloud;
- visual — how it is written and perceived by the eye;
- meaningful — what value it carries.
Adding one word or changing the ending rarely saves the day. A telling example from the IT sector is known: the names 'Windows' and 'There is window' were deemed similar for the purposes of trademark protection, even though they visually are different phrases. This means that when choosing a name, one cannot rely only on checking for exact matches — one must also look for phonetically similar variants within the same classes.
The Sova case: how a cultural check nearly doomed the launch
The team developing a sleep application chose the name Sova — 'sova' in Russian, a logical association with night and rest. They checked English and Russian — everything was clean, associations were positive. But they did not check the name in Swedish or French.
In Swedish, 'sova' literally means 'to sleep' — seemingly a fortunate coincidence for an app about sleep. However, in French pronunciation, the name sounds like 'Ça va?' — a colloquial 'how are you?', which creates a strange confusion in sound advertising and voice search. Neither of these is critical at the stage of a local launch in one country, but it becomes a problem when scaling to multiple markets simultaneously, when the same name must work in the App Store across several locales at once. The conclusion is simple: checking the cultural and phonetic value is necessary in all languages where a launch is planned, not just those that seem obvious.
Localization: why a literal translation of key terms is a dead end
Since 2026 year, the requirement for localized names for global apps has become mandatory, not optional. A common mistake is to take the Russian or English semantic core and translate it literally into other languages, preserving the structure of key terms.
This doesn't work because search behavior differs by country more than it appears. The same product — a tank shooter — is searched for with the query 'game about tanks' in Turkey, whereas the same genre is called 'online shooter' in Great Britain, although technically these are different accents of the same gaming process. The correct approach is to build the semantic core from scratch for each market using local query frequency tools, rather than translating an existing list of keywords through a dictionary.
How to check a name without a patent attorney
A full legal expert opinion will be conducted better by a representative, but a basic filter can be done independently and eliminate obviously failing options before spending money on a consultation.
- Check the exact and phonetically similar match in the open database of trademarks of Rospatent by classes 09, 42, and if applicable, 45.
- Check the domain, but not as the main, but as additional signal — by itself it guarantees nothing.
- Check the availability of the name in the App Store and Google Play — not only exact matches, but also similar spellings of competitors.
- Run the name through language carriers (or transliteration services) in all launch markets — at minimum to check for unpleasant phonetic similarities, as in the case of Sova.
- Check the pronunciation aloud — phonetic similarity is evaluated separately from visual, and mistakes are more noticeable by ear.
This set of steps does not replace patent examination before filing an application, but it filters out most candidates who will inevitably create problems — and saves time negotiating with the representative for the single remaining option, rather than ten.
Why a good ASO name may be unregistrable
The app title has the highest weight for ranking in the App Store — higher than the description, keywords, and subtitle combined. Logic suggests: a name with a keyword that best describes the product's essence should be chosen. 'Step fitness tracker' — seemingly the ideal option for search.
Now let's look at the law. According to Article 1483 of the Russian Civil Code, the main requirement for a trademark is distinctiveness: the name must indicate the manufacturer, not describe the product itself. Fantasy words like 'Yandex' or 'Kodak' are registered without problems. Descriptive phrases like 'Fresh bread' or 'Step fitness tracker' — almost never. It turns out that the better a name works for ASO, the worse it passes registration. This is not a theoretical conflict, but something every other team faces when choosing a name based on advice from articles about App Store Optimization.
A working compromise is a hybrid structure: invent a fantasy or partially neologistic core of the name, and move the descriptive part to the subtitle (subtitle in the App Store) or to the developer name in Google Play, which is also fully indexed there. This way, the brand gets legal protection, and search gets keywords.
How the ranking by name works in practice
The limit on characters in both stores is 30 signs. But the user sees about 15 characters on a smartphone screen, and even fewer on the main iOS screen, around 11. This means that the first words play the decisive role: if the meaning or recognizability appear after the 12-th character, for most users they simply do not exist.
| Parameter | App Store | Google Play |
|---|---|---|
| What is indexed | Name, subtitle, keywords (hidden field) | Name, full description, developer name |
| Name weight in ranking | Highest among all fields | High, but competes with description text |
| Visible part on screen | ~11 characters on main screen | ~15 characters in search results list |
| How localization is determined | By uploaded locales in App Store Connect | By uploaded locales in Play Console |
Separate issue — write the phrase "available in 10 languages" in the description, hoping to boost relevance. Both stores determine in which languages the app is available not by the text, but by the fact of uploaded localizations in the developer console. Characters spent on this are simply wasted.
Legal traps that are not visible at first glance
Checking for a free domain is a habit inherited from web naming, and for apps it is misleading. A free domain says nothing about whether a similar trademark is registered in Rospatent. You need to check the database by Nice classes — for a mobile app, this is usually several classes at once: 09 (software), 42 (software development services, SaaS), and 45 (if the product is related to legal or personal services).
Courts and patent experts, when assessing similarity, look at three features simultaneously:
- phonetic — how the name sounds aloud;
- visual — how it is written and perceived by the eye;
- meaningful — what value it carries.
Adding one word or changing the ending rarely saves the day. A telling example from the IT sector is known: the names 'Windows' and 'There is window' were deemed similar for the purposes of trademark protection, even though they visually are different phrases. This means that when choosing a name, one cannot rely only on checking for exact matches — one must also look for phonetically similar variants within the same classes.
The Sova case: how a cultural check nearly doomed the launch
The team developing a sleep application chose the name Sova — 'sova' in Russian, a logical association with night and rest. They checked English and Russian — everything was clean, associations were positive. But they did not check the name in Swedish or French.
In Swedish, 'sova' literally means 'to sleep' — seemingly a fortunate coincidence for an app about sleep. However, in French pronunciation, the name sounds like 'Ça va?' — a colloquial 'how are you?', which creates a strange confusion in sound advertising and voice search. Neither of these is critical at the stage of a local launch in one country, but it becomes a problem when scaling to multiple markets simultaneously, when the same name must work in the App Store across several locales at once. The conclusion is simple: checking the cultural and phonetic value is necessary in all languages where a launch is planned, not just those that seem obvious.
Localization: why a literal translation of key terms is a dead end
Since 2026 year, the requirement for localized names for global apps has become mandatory, not optional. A common mistake is to take the Russian or English semantic core and translate it literally into other languages, preserving the structure of key terms.
This doesn't work because search behavior differs by country more than it appears. The same product — a tank shooter — is searched for with the query 'game about tanks' in Turkey, whereas the same genre is called 'online shooter' in Great Britain, although technically these are different accents of the same gaming process. The correct approach is to build the semantic core from scratch for each market using local query frequency tools, rather than translating an existing list of keywords through a dictionary.
How to check a name without a patent attorney
A full legal expert opinion will be conducted better by a representative, but a basic filter can be done independently and eliminate obviously failing options before spending money on a consultation.
- Check the exact and phonetically similar match in the open database of trademarks of Rospatent by classes 09, 42, and if applicable, 45.
- Check the domain, but not as the main, but as additional signal — by itself it guarantees nothing.
- Check the availability of the name in the App Store and Google Play — not only exact matches, but also similar spellings of competitors.
- Run the name through language carriers (or transliteration services) in all launch markets — at minimum to check for unpleasant phonetic similarities, as in the case of Sova.
- Check the pronunciation aloud — phonetic similarity is evaluated separately from visual, and mistakes are more noticeable by ear.
This set of steps does not replace patent examination before filing an application, but it filters out most candidates who will inevitably create problems — and saves time negotiating with the representative for the single remaining option, rather than ten.
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