Ugur Seker

I kept running into the same problem from the other side of it: picking a name for something, checking it in one app store in one country, and finding out later that the answer was different somewhere else. App Store listings are per-country catalogs, so “is this name taken” has 44 different answers, not one. Checking them by hand is tedious enough that nobody does it, which is exactly why people find out too late.

checkappnames is the tool I wanted: one search, every storefront that matters, plus Google Play, with exact conflicts separated from lookalikes so the result is actionable rather than a wall of hits.

The parts of this problem I have spent real time on are the unglamorous ones: matching names across scripts and writing systems without producing nonsense, handling storefronts that rate-limit or fail without silently reporting them as clean, and deciding what deserves to be called a conflict versus what deserves a second look. Unicode normalization in particular turned out to be where the interesting bugs live — the one that cost me the most was a case where stripping accents also destroyed Japanese voiced kana.

I have written all of that down rather than keeping it as a black box. If you want to know exactly how a result was produced, the methodology page documents the rules, the storefront list, and the cases where the answer is wrong.

Every guide on this site is written by me, based on operating the checker and on primary documentation from Apple, Google Play, and the trademark offices — each guide lists its sources. Where something is outside my expertise, I say so: I am a developer, not a lawyer, and the trademark guide is written to help you recognise when you need one rather than to substitute for one.

If a result looks wrong, a guide is out of date, or you want to tell me something I got wrong, email me at contact@checkappnames.com. I read everything that comes in. More about the project itself is on the about page.