The Last Mile Is Data Entry

The build is green, the screenshots are cut, and then you sit in front of a 30 character subtitle field in eight languages.

That field is the last thing between a finished app and the store. App Store Connect wants a subtitle, keywords, a description, promotional text and release notes, once per language, each with its own hard cap. None of it is decoration. It is the search index: nobody finds your app by reading its source, they find it because someone put the right words into a 100 character field.

Which is the part nobody warns you about. You spend months on the interesting problems, get the architecture where you want it, ship a build that finally behaves, and then the release stops moving because of five text files times eight locales. The engineering is finished. What is left is data entry, by hand, in languages you do not all speak.

That is why I wrote a PUCO prompt for it, and the useful part is not that it writes ASO copy. It is that it writes it in Fastlane's shape.

It takes the locale list from fastlane/config/apps.yml, so you get the languages your project actually has registered, not the ones a model finds plausible. It reads the existing metadata of your primary locale as the reference for what the app really does, which stops it inventing features you never shipped. Then, per locale, five files:

• description.txt, 4000
• subtitle.txt, 30
• keywords.txt, 100, lowercase, no space after the commas
• promotional_text.txt, 170
• release_notes.txt, 4000

Limits are re-checked after translation, because translation changes length and German is not shy about it.

It will not decide your positioning. It only takes away counting characters in Italian at half past eleven at night.

The prompt, with every field rule and limit, is here on puco.app. Fastlane itself lives at fastlane.org.