How to Name an App

An app name has less room than any other brand name. It has to fit under an icon, stand out in a store search full of look-alikes, and still be the word people say when they tell a friend to get it. This guide covers the length that survives a home screen, the store rules that decide what a title may hold, how to make a name findable, and the checks to run before you design an icon around it.

By Rodrigo Chame — independent creator with a digital marketing background. Published October 5, 2026.

The icon label decides the length

The first place most people read your app's name is the label under its icon, and phones shorten a label that does not fit, with an ellipsis or by cutting it off. How many characters fit depends on the phone, the font size and the language, so the safe answer is short: one word, about nine letters or fewer, shows in full nearly everywhere.

Short is not only about fitting. A one-word name is what people say out loud, what they type into a store search and what they remember a week later. If your name needs two words, test the label on a real phone before you commit to it.

The store title is not the same thing as the name

The App Store and Google Play both give the title 30 characters. Most successful apps use that space as name plus a short descriptor: the name is the brand, the descriptor tells a searcher what it does. "Name: Habit Tracker" reads better in a results list than a name stretched to say everything.

Both stores police what a title may hold. Google Play's metadata policy rejects titles with emojis, with words about price or rank such as free, best or #1, and with capital letters used for emphasis rather than as part of the brand. Apple's guidelines ask for a name that is short, distinct and free of other apps' trademarks and of keywords stuffed in for search. A name built on any of those tricks gets rejected or renamed later.

Findable beats descriptive

A plain dictionary word, Notes or Budget, competes with every app and article that uses the word. Typing it into a store returns a page of rivals, and yours is one of them. A name that is a light twist on a real word, a short blend or a familiar word used somewhere unexpected is easier to find and easier to protect: search the exact name and you get you.

The patterns that keep working are small: a real word with an app ending (-ly, -ify), two short parts fused into one word, or a single evocative word from outside your category. The app name generator makes all three, one word and nine letters or fewer each.

Say it, then spell it

Read the name aloud to someone and ask them to type it. If they spell it wrong, the people who hear about your app will search for the wrong thing. Dropped vowels and swapped letters (Flickr, Tumblr) work for a brand that is already famous; for a new app they cost you every word-of-mouth install that ends in a failed search.

Also say it in the other languages of the markets you want. A name that is neutral in English can be a joke, a slang word or a competitor's name somewhere else.

Check it before you design around it

  1. Both stores. Search the exact name in the App Store on a phone and on Google Play. A different app with the same name in your category is a reason to move on.
  2. The .com or a close domain. The exact .com is best; get or app before or after the name, or a .app domain, are common fallbacks.
  3. Social handles. The same handle everywhere you will post saves a support headache later.
  4. A trademark search in each country you will launch in. A store listing does not give you the name; a trademark does, and a trademark owner can take a store name back.

The generator's Check .com reads the public registry once for the exact domain and says when it looked, and each name links to a Google Play search. Neither is a trademark search.

Related