How to check if an app name is taken

An app name can be taken in four different places, and most people only check one. Here's the order that saves you the most pain, and the honest limits of each check.

1. The App Store and Google Play

This is the one that matters most and the one people skip. Open the App Store on a phone, search your exact name, and look at the first ten results. If an app with your name, or your name plus a word, sits in that list with a few hundred ratings, you are going to spend your launch fighting them for your own brand.

Do the same on Google Play. The two stores index differently, and a name that's clear on one can be crowded on the other.

Things store search can't tell you:

• Reserved names. A developer can create an app record in App Store Connect with your name and never ship it. Search only shows published apps, so a reserved name is invisible until you try to submit.
• Other countries. Storefronts are separate. A name that's clear in the US can be an established brand in Japan or Brazil. Check the countries you plan to launch in.
• Subtitle collisions. Apple lets apps put keywords in a 30-character subtitle. If three apps already use your name there, ranking for it will be hard even without an exact-title match.

NameHQ runs this search for you in up to five countries at once and shows you the results in a phone frame, with exact and near matches called out.

2. The domain

Check the .com first because that's what people type, but don't stop if it's taken. For an app, .app and .dev are both run by Google, both are HTTPS-only, and both read as legitimate to a technical audience. .io still works for developer tools. See which TLD to pick.

A quick way to check any domain without an account: look up its DNS. If the name has nameservers, someone owns it. If it doesn't, check the registry's RDAP record, which is the modern replacement for WHOIS. NameHQ does both and falls back to a commercial API when a registry is slow.

3. Social handles

Handles are harder to acquire than domains. A parked .com has a price; a dormant @handle usually has no seller. Check X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube for the exact slug you'd use, with spaces and punctuation removed. If your name is over 15 characters it won't fit on X at all.

YouTube has an official API for this. The others don't, and they sometimes block automated checks. Any tool that claims certainty on Instagram or X is guessing. See handle consistency.

4. Developer namespaces

If you'll ever open-source anything, publish an SDK, or launch on Product Hunt, check the GitHub org, the npm package name and the Product Hunt slug now. They're free to claim and almost never given back. See claiming your dev namespaces.

What a clear result means

A clear result across all four means nobody is publicly using the name in the places your users will look. It does not mean you have the right to use it. Trademarks are a separate question with a separate search, and a registered mark in your category beats every domain and handle you own. Read trademarks 101 for indie devs before you order stickers.