How we name an app
Naming an app is one of the few decisions you genuinely cannot undo without losing every user who already downloaded it. We treat it like that.
A name ends up everywhere: on the Home Screen, in store listings across several platforms, in a browser toolbar tooltip, in support emails, in the way people describe the app to a friend. Changing it later means changing all of that at once and hoping nobody gets lost along the way. So we spend the time up front, even while the app itself is still a rough prototype.
Our rules
One or two syllables. Easier to remember, easier to say out loud, easier to fit in a Home Screen label.
We’ll admit this is the rule we bend most. Fisharo, Cultivy and Migrella all run a syllable longer than our ideal, and each one went through a round of reading aloud before we accepted it. The rule is really about effort: a name should come out of your mouth without a pause, and an extra syllable that makes a name easier to say is better than a short one that trips you up.
No category words. “Notes” or “Calendar” in a name guarantees we’ll be confused with twenty other apps forever. We use category words in the subtitle, not the title.
The subtitle is where store search happens anyway. Migrella is a name; “migraine tracker” is what it does, and it belongs next to the name, not inside it. The occasional exception is deliberate: for a small desktop utility, a name that hints at the job can be worth more than a distinctive one, and we make that trade knowingly.
Pronounceable in our top three locales. If a name reads naturally in English but breaks teeth in German, we keep looking.
The domain has to be available. Not a deal-breaker, but a strong tiebreaker. More than one of our names changed late because the .com was held by a squatter.
How we test a shortlist
Once we’re down to a few candidates, we try each one in the places it will actually live. We mock up a Home Screen with the name under an icon and check whether it truncates. We say it in a sentence — “I log my headaches in ___” — and listen for whether it sounds like a product or a typo. We search it in every store we plan to ship on, because a name that collides with an established app on one platform is a problem on all of them. We check social handles too, though we’re less strict there.
And we sleep on it. A name that seems brilliant at the end of a long naming session is often just tired. If it still feels right a few days later, it’s probably a keeper.
What we got wrong
We used to fall for names that were clever on paper — a pun, a mash-up of two words — and then watch them fail the read-aloud test. People couldn’t spell them after hearing them, which would have made word of mouth harder. Now, if a name needs explaining, it’s out.
What we don’t do
We don’t use AI to generate names. We’ve tried — the outputs have a recognizable, slightly off-flavor texture that we can spot in other apps and that we don’t want on ours.
A good name, in the end, is one people stop noticing. They just use it.