How Do I Choose Which Countries to Launch My App In?

Expanding an app beyond your initial launch country is one of those decisions that looks straightforward on paper but gets complicated fast once you start digging into the details. Most app founders think about international expansion in terms of potential downloads and revenue (which makes sense), but the reality is that choosing the right markets requires you to weigh up dozens of factors that all interact with each other in ways that aren't immediately obvious... and I've seen plenty of projects lose serious money by rushing into markets they didn't properly understand.

After a decade of building apps that operate in dozens of countries, the pattern is always the same: the markets that look most attractive on a spreadsheet often end up being the most expensive to crack, while the ones you initially dismiss can become your most profitable territories if you approach them correctly.

Understanding Your Home Market Performance First

Look, the first question I always ask when someone wants to go international is whether they've actually figured out their home market yet. This sounds basic but you'd be surprised how many founders want to expand globally when they haven't even worked out why their app succeeds or fails in the market they know best. Your home territory gives you the cleanest data you'll ever get because there are fewer variables... you understand the culture, the language issues don't exist, and you can actually talk to your users without needing translators or dealing with time zone headaches.

What matters most is understanding your user acquisition costs, your retention curves at different time intervals (day one, day seven, day thirty), and your actual revenue per user after they've been with you for at least ninety days. If you can't get these numbers to work in your home market where everything is easiest, they definitely won't work somewhere harder.

The metrics you need locked down are:

• Cost per install broken down by channel and user demographic
• Percentage of users who complete your onboarding process
• Retention rates at seven, thirty and ninety days
• Average revenue per paying user over their lifetime
• Time from install to first purchase or conversion action
• Reasons users cite for abandoning or deleting your app

Revenue Potential vs Market Entry Costs

The maths here is brutally simple but most people get it wrong because they only look at one side of the equation. Yes, China has over a billion smartphone users and that sounds incredible... but getting an app approved and marketed in China realistically costs anywhere from £80k to £200k depending on your category, and that's before you've acquired a single user. Countries like Germany or Japan might have smaller populations but the infrastructure is already there, users are comfortable paying for apps, and you can test the market for maybe £15k to £20k.

I've probably done this calculation fifty times now for different clients, and what you're looking for is the ratio between potential monthly revenue and your entry costs. If a market needs £50k to enter properly and you reckon you can generate £5k per month in revenue within six months, that's a twenty month payback period... which is honestly too long for most apps unless you're backed by serious funding. This is where proper ROI forecasting becomes essential to avoid expensive mistakes.

Start by listing markets where your app category is already doing well. Check App Annie or Sensor Tower for category rankings and revenue estimates in different territories. The best markets are usually ones where competitors are making money but haven't completely dominated yet.

App Store Competition and Category Saturation

Every market has different apps dominating different categories, and this affects your chances way more than people realise. In the UK, if you're building a food delivery app, you're competing with Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats who have massive brand recognition and marketing budgets... but in Poland or Czech Republic, the market leaders are different companies with smaller war chests, which means you might actually have a shot at getting noticed.

What I look at is the top twenty apps in your category for each target market, then I check how old they are and when they last had significant updates. If the top apps are all maintained by huge companies and getting updated every few weeks, that market is going to be expensive to crack. But if you see apps that haven't been updated in months or apps that clearly haven't adapted to newer iOS or Android features, that's often a sign you can compete on quality and user experience.

Finding Your Competition Gap

The pattern I've noticed is that apps which succeed internationally usually find a specific gap in each market rather than trying to do exactly what worked at home. A fitness app we worked on struggled in the US where the market was packed, but absolutely flew in Brazil where there were hardly any Portuguese language fitness apps with proper workout tracking... they didn't change the core product, they just found a market that needed it. Understanding what motivates users to download apps in different markets can reveal these opportunities.

Payment Infrastructure and Monetisation Realities

Right, this is where things get messy fast. The way people pay for things varies wildly by country, and if your monetisation model doesn't match local preferences, you're basically dead in the water regardless of how good your app is. In the Netherlands, roughly eighty percent of users prefer iDEAL for payments and barely use credit cards... so if your app only accepts cards through Stripe, you've just excluded most potential customers.

The hardest lesson about international payments is that what seems like a technical detail turns out to be the main reason users abandon your purchase flow, and you often don't realise this until you've already spent twenty or thirty grand acquiring users who can't actually pay you.

Countries in Southeast Asia heavily favour e-wallets and mobile payment systems... credit card penetration in places like Indonesia or Vietnam might only be fifteen to twenty percent of the population. Meanwhile in Germany, direct debit is massive but credit cards are less common than you'd expect. Each payment method you add costs money to integrate and maintain (usually between £3k and £8k per method depending on complexity), so you can't just add everything.

Subscription Pricing Psychology

The other thing is that price sensitivity changes dramatically by market. A subscription that costs £4.99 per month barely registers in the UK or US, but in India or Brazil that same price point adjusted for local currency might be what people spend on lunch... so your whole pricing structure needs rethinking. I've seen apps cut their prices by seventy percent in emerging markets and still struggle because the payment friction was too high. Understanding mobile app pricing psychology becomes even more critical when dealing with different cultural attitudes towards spending.

Language Barriers and Cultural Adaptation Needs

Getting your app translated is the easy bit... any half decent translation agency can handle that for maybe £50 to £150 per thousand words depending on the language. What kills most international launches is that you translated the words but didn't adapt the actual experience to make sense in that culture. Dates formatted wrong, currency symbols in weird places, images that don't resonate with local users, or worse... metaphors and phrases that seem totally normal in English but sound bizarre or offensive when translated literally.

A healthcare app we built for the UK market used a lot of casual, friendly language that worked brilliantly for British users. Worked well. When we expanded to Germany, users found the tone unprofessional and didn't trust it for medical advice... we had to rewrite probably forty percent of the interface copy to be more formal and direct, even though the translation was technically accurate.

Beyond Simple Translation

Then there's stuff like customer support expectations. In Japan, users expect incredibly detailed FAQs and will try hard to solve problems themselves before contacting support... but in many Western markets, people go straight to the contact form. Your support infrastructure needs to match these patterns or you'll either drown in support tickets or have users who feel abandoned. Even something as simple as icon design choices can vary significantly between cultures and affect user comprehension.

Technical Requirements and Platform Differences

Different countries have different technical realities that affect whether your app will even work properly. Internet speeds in somewhere like South Korea are incredibly fast and cheap, so users expect apps to load high-resolution images and video instantly... but in India, a huge chunk of users are still on 3G connections that cost them money per megabyte, which means your app needs to be way more data-conscious or people simply won't use it.

China is the obvious example where you need completely different infrastructure... Google Play doesn't exist there, so you're distributing through stores like Xiaomi, Huawei and Tencent, each with their own requirements. Push notifications work through different systems, maps need to be from local providers, and your entire backend might need to be hosted within China to get acceptable performance. These platform differences extend to features like dark mode implementation and other UI elements that vary between operating systems.

Test your app performance on mid-range Android phones from three years ago using 3G speeds before launching in emerging markets. If it's unusable in these conditions, you'll lose most potential users regardless of how good your marketing is. Tools like Android Studio's network throttling can simulate these conditions.

Then there's regulations... GDPR affects how you handle data for European users, but countries like Russia have data localisation laws requiring user data to be stored on servers physically located in Russia. Setting up compliant infrastructure can easily cost £30k to £50k per market if you need local hosting. You need to understand what technical constraints might make certain features impossible in different jurisdictions.

Building a Phased International Rollout Plan

The approach that actually works is starting small with one or two test markets that share characteristics with your home market but have lower entry costs. For UK apps, places like Ireland or Australia make sense as initial expansion targets... same language, similar payment preferences, comparable app store dynamics. You learn the process of international expansion in an easier environment before tackling harder markets.

What you're really doing is building your international infrastructure and processes. Setting up payment systems that can handle multiple currencies, building localisation workflows so you can add new languages without breaking things, creating customer support systems that can handle multiple time zones... this stuff is expensive and complicated, so you want to prove it works before rolling it out to ten countries at once. The timeline expectations for international rollouts are often underestimated by stakeholders who don't understand the complexity involved.

A realistic phased rollout might look like:

1. Launch in one similar market to test your expansion infrastructure (months one to three)
2. Fix everything that broke and optimise based on what you learned (months four to six)
3. Launch in two to three markets with different characteristics to stress-test your systems (months seven to twelve)
4. Analyse which market types work best for your app and double down on similar markets (months twelve onwards)

The timeline matters because you need to give each market enough time to actually prove whether it works. Some markets take longer to gain traction than others... German users tend to be more cautious and take longer to adopt new apps compared to US users who'll try something new quite quickly. This is where having a solid notification strategy becomes crucial for re-engaging users who might need more touchpoints before converting.

Conclusion

Choosing which countries to launch your app in comes down to finding markets where your unit economics work, where you can actually compete, and where the technical and cultural requirements don't require you to basically rebuild the whole thing. The biggest mistake I see is founders treating international expansion as a way to fix an app that isn't working at home... but if your core metrics don't work in your easiest market, they definitely won't work in harder ones. Start with markets similar to where you've already succeeded, prove you can make the expansion process work, then gradually move into markets that require more adaptation and investment.

The countries that make sense for your app are probably different from the ones that make sense for someone else's app, and that's fine... there's no universal answer here, just a framework for thinking through the tradeoffs and making decisions based on your specific situation and resources.

If you're working through these questions for your own app and want someone to sense-check your thinking, get in touch and we can talk through your specific situation.

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