The Apple App Store is awesome. It has the advantage of reaching millions of users around the world without ever really having to internationalize your app business. Practically, you do not even need to leave your home – all you have to do is check the boxes for the different countries when uploading your app. Additionally, you can use English for the description text of every country’s app detail page. The same goes for the language you use within in your app. In fact, for app developers outside of the U.S. this is as exciting as for those within the U.S. Those not from the United States are able to reach a huge market (the biggest for iPhone apps) and for U.S.-developers, it’s a pretty big upside to potentially reach a lot more customers than “just” the one in the own domestic market.

We just recently talked to a smaller developer from Germany (“smaller” meaning he has three apps on the App Store and his “app endeavors” are still at an early stage), who is working on his app projects part-time, though considering to go full-time soon. This developer started with an app which he put up on the App Store in German and, of course, English – sales were doing fine at 79 and 99 Cents respectively. Obviously, this developer didn’t have a lot of budget to spend on anything, but he decided use some of his money for a translation service (no, not Google Translator – this is the translation service he used) to have the detail page of the app translated into 5 European languages. According to him, after adding the translations of the product descriptions to his detail page, sales went up immediately and also (as an effect of that) his app went up in the rankings, which then resulted in even more sales. Of course, he is now dealing with more “local” support requests, which is quite a challenge, but in general, this small effort really helped him get his app business off the ground.

So today, this is the story we wanted to share with you, the moral of which you may find by reading the headline. If you have any similar stories of the like – we would love to hear them!