Naming an app is harder than building one
Naming is where well-meaning product teams go to die. It should be easy — just pick a word. It’s never just a word.
The name has to be short. Memorable. Spellable. Pronounceable in at least three languages. Not already a trademark. Domain available, ideally. Social handles available, definitely. Works in a logo. Works as an icon. Works in a sentence (“Sent you a thing on Zydeno”). Does not sound like the name of someone’s ex.
For a studio that ships on several platforms, add a few more: it has to survive five different app stores, each with its own search, its own character limits and its own existing apps with similar names. A name that’s free on one store can collide with something established on another.
Our process, such as it is
We start wide. A shared document, everyone contributes. Real words, invented words, compound words, words in other languages. Anything that evokes the feeling we want the product to have.
At this stage there are no bad suggestions, and quantity helps. We write down the feeling first — calm, outdoorsy, practical, a little playful — and let names come from that rather than from the feature list.
Then we narrow. Read every name out loud. Cross off everything that’s awkward to say, or that you’d be embarrassed to tell your parents you work on. Cross off anything a trademark search turns up. Cross off anything that’s on the first page of Google already.
By the end, there are usually three candidates left. We pick the one that sounds most like what the product is, not what it does.
Is versus does
That distinction does a lot of work. A name that describes the function ties the app to a single feature, and apps grow. A name that captures the character can grow with it. Wandry hints at wandering without spelling out “trip planner.” Fisharo sounds like it belongs near water without being called “Fish Forecast.” The description goes in the store subtitle, where it can change as the app does.
There are exceptions. A small desktop utility sometimes benefits from a name that says what it does, because nobody goes browsing for a text cleaner. Tidytext is that kind of name, and it’s a trade we made on purpose.
The trade-offs
Invented words are easier to own — domains, handles, search results — but they cost something too. Nobody knows what they mean on day one, so the icon, the subtitle and the first screenshot have to do all the explaining. Real words are instantly understood but almost always taken. We usually land somewhere in between: a word that feels familiar without being in the dictionary.
What we got wrong
We’ve been tempted to rush a name because the app was ready and the name wasn’t. The times we came close, the candidates that seemed fine under deadline pressure looked much weaker a week later. Now naming starts early, in parallel with the build, so it’s never the last thing standing between an app and a release.
When in doubt
A nothing-word is better than a bad word. “Figma” means nothing. “Stripe” means many things, mostly unrelated to payments. “Notion” means a half-formed idea, which is perfect for a tool that captures half-formed ideas. Meaning is something a name earns over time — you don’t have to start with it.