App Name Generator

App names get cut off more than any other kind

This is the constraint that should drive the decision. An app name appears under an icon on a home screen, in a store listing, in a search result, in a notification and in a share sheet, and several of those truncate hard — the label under an icon commonly shows around a dozen characters before it gives up.

A name that gets cut is not just ugly. It means the thing the user taps every day is labelled with a fragment, and the fragment is what they will actually call it.

That is why this tool opens on short single words. Check any candidate by writing it out and covering everything past the twelfth character, then asking whether what remains still identifies the app.

Findable is not the same as memorable

Two different problems get confused here. Being found in a store search is a discovery problem; being remembered and returned to is a retention problem. Names optimise for them differently.

A descriptive name helps discovery, because it contains the words people search. A distinctive name helps memory, because it is a thing rather than a description.

The usual resolution is to let the name be distinctive and the subtitle carry the descriptive words, since store listings give you a separate field for exactly this. Cramming keywords into the name itself reads as spam to users even where it is permitted, and it makes the name longer at precisely the point where length costs most.

Say it to a voice assistant

Apps get opened by voice, asked about by voice, and recommended out loud far more than most software. A name that a voice assistant mishears, or that has to be spelled, loses those paths silently.

Two specific traps. A name that is a homophone of a common word will resolve to the common word. A name containing a digit is ambiguous when spoken, because the listener cannot tell whether to type the numeral or the word.

The pronounceability filtering here rejects genuinely unsayable strings before you see them, but only a person can tell you whether a sayable name is also an unambiguous one.

What the icon label does to two-word names

A two-word app name has a specific problem: the space is where the truncation tends to land, so you frequently end up displaying only the first word. If the first word is the generic half, the label becomes meaningless.

If you do want two words, put the distinctive one first and treat the second as a bonus that may never be displayed. If the name only works with both halves visible, it is a one-word name that has not been written yet.

Naming for one platform or several

If the app will exist on more than one store, plus a web version, the name has to clear every one of those at once, and their rules are not identical. Length limits differ, permitted characters differ, and what counts as too similar to an existing listing differs.

It is worth checking all of them before you commit, because discovering a conflict on the second platform after you have shipped on the first is an expensive kind of surprise. None of that checking happens in this tool.

Reading the score for an app name

Each result is scored on pronounceability, structure, likely spelling, length and syllable count, with the reasoning under “Why this score”.

Weight length hardest here — more than for almost any other kind of name — and spelling second. An app name that is short, unambiguous and survives truncation has solved the problems a name can solve. The rest is whether it suits the product.

Changing the name after launch

Renaming an app is more expensive than renaming most things, and it is worth understanding why before you settle for a name you are unsure about.

Existing installs keep the old icon label until they update. Reviews, ratings and any store ranking history are attached to the listing rather than the name, so they survive, but every external link, article and word-of-mouth recommendation still points at the old name. Support tickets arrive using both names for a long time.

None of that makes renaming impossible, and plenty of apps do it successfully. It does mean the cheapest time to get the name right is before the first release, when the only thing you have to change is a line in a configuration file.

If you are already shipped and the name is genuinely wrong, the usual advice is to move once and decisively rather than in stages. Running two names in parallel while people “get used to” the new one produces a long period where neither name is the answer to “what is it called”, and that ambiguity costs more than the switch itself.

Before you submit anything

This tool does not check whether an app name is taken, on any store, as a domain, as a handle, or as a trademark, and it makes no claim that a suggestion is free.

Search each store you intend to publish on. Check the handles you will want. And be aware that app names sit in a category where similar-name disputes are common, so a name that merely resembles an established app in the same category is worth avoiding even where nothing formally prevents it.