Twelve plant identifier and plant care apps, one shared layout. Almost all of them run local-language ads in the big five (Germany and Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal) and a single English ad across the smaller EU storefronts. Nobody writes Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak or Polish. Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires, records the country and the copy of every App Store ad, so the whole structure is readable from outside. Data window ends 23 July 2026.
The two-tier setup, in the data
Botan App Limited's "Plant Identifier & Care App" runs one English creative, "Scan all this leaf, flower", across 17 storefronts: Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Sweden. Apple dates it past a year and it was still recorded on 22 July 2026. Alongside it, Botan writes German for Germany and Austria ("Bäume und Blätter Bestimmen"), French ("Reconnaitre les Plantes,Fleurs"), Italian ("Riconoscere Fiori e Alberi") and Dutch ("Identificatie Bloemen en Bomen"). All of those are also past a year and still running.
PlantIn does the same thing at a wider spread. Its English line, "Plant Finder & Disease ID App", covers 19 storefronts, from Belgium and Bulgaria through to Slovakia, and started on 6 February 2026. Its local set is Portuguese (334 days), Spanish (306 days), French (255 days), German (166 days) and Italian (152 days). Plant Parent runs English, "Identify, Diagnose & Reminders", across 13 storefronts in one format and 15 in another, both past a year, both still recorded on 22 July.
The line between the two tiers is drawn by market size. Nothing in the smaller storefronts gets its own language from anyone in this category.
The broken English line that outlived everyone
"Scan all this leaf, flower" is not a sentence. It reads like a translation that lost a word on the way in. It is also, on the numbers here, the most durable creative in the category: 17 storefronts, past Apple's one-year window, still recorded on 22 July 2026, on 923 total ad records.
Compare what it outlived. Plantum had year-plus lines in German, French, Italian and English, and switched every one of them off on 14 May 2026. Planta's Italian and Swedish lines, both older than a year, went off on 10 May. Blossom's English line ran 225 days in Greece and Hungary and stopped in March. A generically named app with an odd English headline is still buying search results in Spain, Portugal and Italy while better-branded rivals with grammatical copy have gone quiet.
Longevity is a proxy for what an advertiser keeps paying for, not a measured conversion rate. But the direction is hard to miss: nobody here is being punished for clumsy English.
The Portuguese line that is not a translation
Plant Parent's English creative sells the feature list: "Identify, Diagnose & Reminders". German gets that same list, "Diagnose und Erinnerungen", French gets "Identifiez et diagnostiquez", Italian gets "Diagnosi e promemoria". Three faithful translations of the same three words.
Portugal gets something else entirely. The Portuguese creative reads "As melhores dicas", which means "the best tips". No identification, no diagnosis, no reminders. It is a different product promise in a different register, and it has run 340 days, from 16 August 2025 to 22 July 2026, longer than the German, French and Italian lines it sits beside. A second Portuguese record with the same copy ran 326 days and came off on 9 July.
The four-market rewrite
PictureThis, from the same publisher as Plant Parent, does not translate one line five times. It writes a different promise per market:
| Market | Creative |
|---|---|
| 10 smaller storefronts | "Plant care and identification" |
| Portugal | "Identifique plantas por foto" (identify plants by photo) |
| Netherlands | "Identificeer bloemen en bomen" (identify flowers and trees) |
| France | "Identification de la plante" |
| Italy | "Identificare la pianta" |
The English line describes a category. The Portuguese one names the method (point the camera at it), the Dutch one names the objects, and the French and Italian ones name only the action. Both the English creative (past Apple's one-year window) and the Portuguese one (304 days) survived, so the per-market rewrite is not on its own what keeps a line alive. What all five share is that they say what the app does in the fewest words that fit.
The Swedish company running English in Germany
Planta AB is a Swedish company with one of the better-known names in plant care, and it appears in 6 of 25 storefronts. Its only creative still live at the window close is an English headline running in Germany and Austria: "Happy Life, Happy Plants!", 239 days, from 25 November 2025 to 22 July 2026.
Everything it wrote in a local language is off. The Italian line "Irrigazione e luce di crescita" and the Swedish line "Påminnelser & skötsel!" were both older than a year and both stopped on 10 May 2026. The French "Traceur d'eau et photomètre" (162 days) and the Dutch "Watertracker & Lichtmeter" (153 days) stopped the same day. The mood line in English is the one that stayed.
Who localizes on day one and who never bothers
One of the newest entrants localized before it had any results to go on. PlantScope put out German and French lines on 29 March 2026 and Italian, Portuguese and Spanish lines on 31 March, all five within three days. Its English line, "Plant Diagnosis & Care Advice", ran 224 days across 11 storefronts and came off on 3 June. The four local lines it launched in March were still recorded on 22 July.
AI Plant Doctor went further and launched in eight languages at once in April, 17 creatives between 8 and 13 April, German through Swedish. Every one of them stopped by 4 May. Longest run: 26 days. Localizing on day one bought it nothing, because the problem was not language.
At the other end, Plant Care Tracker (Ploi, a solo developer) has never written a word in anything but English, including in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. Its English line "Plant Care" ran past Apple's one-year window across 17 storefronts before it stopped in January 2026, and its current English line, "Water Reminder & Journal", has run 106 days across 16 storefronts.
What to do with this if you are launching in the EU
- Write one English creative for the small storefronts and leave it there. Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Poland see English from every advertiser here, and those English lines run past a year. Botan's runs past a year while being ungrammatical.
- Translate for Germany and Austria, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, and translate the verb. The surviving local copy in this category names the action: identify, diagnose, remind. "Identifique plantas por foto" and "Identificatie Bloemen en Bomen" are what a year-plus creative looks like.
- Do not localize on day one and call it a strategy. AI Plant Doctor launched eight languages in April and stopped all of them within a month. PlantScope launched five in March and kept four. Same tactic, opposite result, which means the copy in the local language was never the deciding factor.
- Read your own Portuguese. Plant Parent's Portuguese line promises something its English line does not, and it has outrun the German, French and Italian versions. Either that was deliberate and worth copying, or nobody checked and it worked anyway.
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 across all 25 EU storefronts, data window ending 23 July 2026. Language is read from the creative copy and the storefronts it ran in. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression, and "still live" means the creative was recorded on 22 July 2026. Apple reports creatives older than its one-year window as over a year rather than a date. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.