Cleaner apps run the clearest two-tier setup we have swept. One English line covers the seventeen smaller EU storefronts, native copy covers the eight bigger ones, and nothing crosses over. Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires, records the copy, the language tag and the country of every App Store ad, so you can read the whole arrangement from outside without a tool or an insider. Twelve cleaner and storage apps, all 25 EU storefronts, zero failed country queries, data window ending 25 July 2026.
The interesting part is not that they translate. It is that they all translate the same eight markets into the same seven languages, and the translations are the same sentence.
The two-tier setup, run twice, independently
Cleanup, from DEEP FLOW SOFTWARE SERVICES, is the largest advertiser here: 1,469 records tracked, 34 creatives, all 25 storefronts. Its English line "Duplicate Photos Cleaner App" is past Apple's one-year window, so Apple will not date the start more precisely than over a year ago, and it was still recorded on 24 July 2026. Underneath it sit seven local-language lines, each in its home market and nowhere else.
On 26 April 2026 Cleanup refreshed the whole set, and the refresh is what makes the structure obvious. The old English line ran in 23 storefronts, including Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria, the same markets that were already getting native copy. The new English line runs in exactly 17: BE, BG, CY, CZ, DK, EE, FI, GR, HR, HU, IE, LU, LV, PL, RO, SI, SK. That is the full list of storefronts nobody in this category translates for. English stopped overlapping the translated markets and now covers only the rest.
CoinCup OU arrived at the same shape without the correction. 855 records, 12 creatives, 24 storefronts (it does not run in Italy at all). Its English line "Clean up cache,photos,contacts" covers 18 storefronts, is past the one-year window, and was still recorded on 24 July 2026. Its German line "Schnelles Entfernen von Caches" (fast removal of caches) is also past the one-year window, also still live, and runs only in Austria and Germany. Same for French in France, Portuguese in Portugal, Spanish in Spain, Swedish in Sweden.
Two publishers, no connection between them, both holding an English line for more than a year while paying separately for the big five or six markets. Whatever else is going on, neither has switched it off.
One sentence, eight languages
Dedupify (Foobar Creative) is small, 67 records across 19 storefronts, and it is the cleanest illustration in the file because one publisher runs the same sentence in all eight languages at once.
| Language | Creative | Storefronts | Days | Last recorded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English (en-GB) | "Delete duplicate photos fast" | BE, BG, CZ, DK, FI, HR, IE, LU, PL, RO, SI | 159 | 2026-07-24 |
| German (de-DE) | "Doppelte Fotos schnell löschen" | AT, DE | 162 | 2026-07-24 |
| Dutch (nl) | "Verwijder dubbele foto's snel" | NL | 162 | 2026-07-24 |
| Italian (it) | "Elimina le foto duplicate" | IT | 160 | 2026-07-24 |
| French (fr-FR) | "Supprimez les photos en double" | FR | 78 | 2026-07-24 |
| Portuguese (pt-PT) | "Apague fotos duplicadas rápido" | PT | 78 | 2026-07-24 |
| Spanish (es-ES) | "Borra fotos duplicadas rápido" | ES | 9 | 2026-05-17 |
| Swedish (sv) | "Radera dubblettfoton snabbt" | SE | 9 | 2026-05-16 |
Read down the column. It is one line, "delete duplicate photos fast", carried across seven languages with the word order adjusted and the Italian dropping "fast". No market gets a different promise, a different feature or a different reason to install. The Spanish and Swedish versions launched in May and stopped after nine days each, which is the only variation in the set, and it is a media decision rather than a copy decision.
Cleanup does the same thing with its own sentence: "Foto reinigen Duplikat löschen" (clean photos, delete duplicates) in German, "Supprimer Doublon Photos" (delete duplicate photos) in French, "Elimina foto duplicate" (delete duplicate photos) in Italian, "Dubbele foto's verwijderen" (delete duplicate photos) in Dutch, "Radera dubbletter av foton" (delete duplicates of photos) in Swedish, "Limpar & Excluir Duplicadas" (clean and delete duplicates) in Portuguese. Cleaner Kit does it with a different sentence about contacts and photos, in the same seven languages.
Two French headlines, four publishers
There are 54 distinct headlines in this sweep. Two of them appear under more than one publisher, both in French, both word for word.
"Nettoyeur de stockage, photos" (storage cleaner, photos) is Cleaner Kit's French line, running in France from 20 January 2026 and still recorded on 24 July. It is also Cleaner Guru's French line, from GM UniverseApps Limited, past the one-year window and last recorded 6 August 2025. Different companies, same 30 characters.
"Supprimer Doublon Photos" (delete duplicate photos) is Cleanup's French line, still live on 24 July 2026. It is also the French line Lilucat ran on Cleaner Guru Free, past the one-year window, last recorded 26 July 2025.
Character limits and a shared feature set will produce collisions on their own. Still, when two headlines out of 54 are shared verbatim by unrelated publishers, the translation step is not where anybody is trying to win.
Who gets translated and who only ever sees English
Every non-English creative in this sweep runs in its home market and nowhere else. German appears in Austria and Germany, and that is the only language tag that covers two storefronts. French only in France, Spanish only in Spain, Italian only in Italy, Portuguese only in Portugal, Dutch only in the Netherlands, Swedish only in Sweden.
That leaves eight storefronts receiving native copy: AT, DE, ES, FR, IT, NL, PT, SE.
And seventeen that only ever see English: BE, BG, CY, CZ, DK, EE, FI, GR, HR, HU, IE, LU, LV, PL, RO, SI, SK.
Ireland is on that list for obvious reasons. The other sixteen are not. None of the twelve apps in this sweep has written a Danish, Finnish, Greek, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, Slovene, Estonian or Latvian cleaner ad in the past year. Belgium never gets Dutch or French, even from publishers already writing both. Denmark and Finland are not small markets, and they sit in the English tier alongside Cyprus and Latvia.
If you were planning to translate into Polish because you assumed your competitors had, they have not.
The counter-example: one line, eighteen countries, no translation
Thanh H Vo's "Phone Cleaner - Smart Clean Up" is the whole other posture in a single app. Two creatives, 32 records, 18 storefronts, and one headline: "Clean, Delete Photos in Phone".
It is tagged en-US, the only en-US creative in the sweep, and it runs in AT, BE, CZ, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, GR, HR, HU, IE, IT, NL, PL, PT, RO and SE. Germany, France, Spain and Italy included. It is past Apple's one-year window and it was still recorded on 24 July 2026.
That is a solo developer serving American English into every market the rest of the category translates for, and doing it for over a year. The volume is a rounding error next to Cleanup's 1,469 records, so this is not proof that translation does nothing. It does mean the untranslated route stays open long enough to be worth measuring before you spend on it.
Cleaner Kit splits its map exactly in half
Cleaner Kit (BPMobile) has 718 records, 21 creatives and 16 storefronts, and of the twelve apps here it puts native copy in front of the largest share of a serious footprint.
Eight of its sixteen storefronts get local copy: Dutch in NL, German in AT and DE, Portuguese in PT, French in FR, Spanish in ES, Italian in IT, Swedish in SE. The other eight get "Photo Cleanup for iPhone" in English: BE, BG, EE, IE, LU, LV, PL, SK. Half and half, with no market seeing both.
The local copy is the same feature list every time. "Fotos und Kontakte Löschen" (delete photos and contacts), "Schoon contacten en foto's op" (clean up contacts and photos), "Limpeza de fotos e contactos" (cleaning photos and contacts), "Limpiar contactos y fotos" (clean contacts and photos), "Pulisci foto e contatti doppi" (clean duplicate photos and contacts). Five languages naming the same two objects in the same order.
Cleaner Guru translates a higher proportion still, eight of its eleven storefronts, but on 170 records it is a tenth of Cleaner Kit's volume and a fraction of the evidence.
What to do with this if you are one person
- Translate the eight, buy the seventeen in English. AT, DE, ES, FR, IT, NL, PT and SE get local copy from everyone here who translates at all. The other seventeen storefronts get English from everyone, including two publishers who have run that English line for over a year without changing it.
- Do not run both languages in the same market. Cleanup was doing that until 26 April 2026, when its new English line dropped to the 17 storefronts with no native copy. CoinCup and Cleaner Kit never overlapped in the first place. Paying for two languages in one storefront means paying twice to answer one question.
- Budget translation as a line item, not a project. In this category the local version is the same sentence with the same features in the same order. "Delete duplicate photos fast" becomes "Radera dubblettfoton snabbt" and nothing else changes. That is a small, mechanical spend, not a repositioning exercise, and you should price it accordingly.
- Do not wait on translation to launch. One developer has run a single en-US line in eighteen storefronts, Germany and France included, for more than a year and it was live last week. Ship English, get the read, then translate the eight.
- Skip the languages nobody writes. Danish, Finnish, Polish, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, Slovene, Estonian and Latvian get no local cleaner copy from any of these twelve apps in this window. There is no competitive pressure there to answer.
The one thing this data cannot tell you is whether any of it converts. Longevity is the only signal in the repository, and a line that survives a year is a line somebody keeps paying for.
You can pull any advertiser at recao.app, free, no account, in about a minute.
Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), swept on 30 July 2026 across all 25 EU storefronts with zero failed country queries, data window 25 July 2025 to 25 July 2026. Twelve cleaner and storage apps. Language is read from Apple's defaultLanguageTag on the creative plus the storefronts it ran in. English glosses of local copy are ours. "Days" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression, and "still live" means the creative was recorded on 24 July 2026. Apple reports creatives older than its one-year window as over a year rather than a date, so those cannot be dated more precisely here. Records are repository records tracked, a proxy for volume and not for spend, and for the larger advertisers Apple caps each country query at around 50 records, so we did not read every one. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.