CJK(Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

What does CJK mean in App Store localization?

CJK is the abbreviation for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the three East Asian languages that share many Unicode codepoints (called Han characters or hanzi/kanji/hanja) but render them differently per locale. CJK scripts are non-Latin: Chinese uses Hanzi (simplified or traditional); Japanese uses a mix of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji; Korean uses Hangul.

For App Store screenshots, CJK introduces two challenges: font support (most Western designer fonts don't ship CJK glyphs) and codepoint disambiguation (the same Han character renders slightly differently in Japanese vs Chinese fonts, which native readers can spot).

How do CJK fonts work on iOS?

Apple ships system fonts for each CJK locale: Hiragino Sans for Japanese, PingFang for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Apple SD Gothic Neo for Korean. When an app renders text in those languages, iOS uses the appropriate system font.

For App Store screenshots, the implication is the design pipeline must declare the locale explicitly. If a screenshot template uses a custom English font like Inter or Helvetica Now, Japanese characters in the same caption fall back to the system font. The result is a visible weight mismatch between the English brand mark and the Japanese caption inside the same frame.

When does CJK matter most?

CJK matters most when localizing to high-revenue Asian markets: Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong. Japan alone has the highest mobile ARPU globally; for any app with paid conversion intent, Japanese localization typically returns positive ROI within months. The CJK font and codepoint considerations are the difference between a localization that reads as native and one that reads as a Western team's translation experiment.