App Names in Email Notifications Are Hard to Identify When Using Japanese Characters

Feature Requests
1

Hi Replit team and community,

I’d like to request a small quality-of-life improvement related to app names shown in Replit email notifications, based on my experience as a Japanese user.

What I’m seeing

When Replit sends system emails (for example, deployment or production publish failures), the app name in the email subject/body appears to be automatically converted into a romanized / phonetic string instead of the original Japanese characters.

Example:

  • Original app name (Japanese):
    ステークホルダー生成

  • App name shown in email:
    sutekuhorudamatupuSheng-Cheng (or similar)

What’s especially confusing is that when the original name includes kanji, the phonetic output often looks closer to Chinese pinyin-style romanization (e.g., capitalized syllables or “-” separated chunks) rather than something a Japanese user would naturally recognize as readable romaji. As a result, it becomes very hard to quickly identify which app the email refers to—especially when managing multiple projects.

Why this is a problem (at least for Japanese users)

  • I assume many Japanese users rely on native Japanese names to distinguish apps.

  • The romanized output is often not intuitive (and kanji in particular can resemble pinyin-like formatting), which adds friction.

  • Email notifications lose much of their usefulness if the app name cannot be quickly identified.

I can’t say for certain whether this affects all non-Latin scripts, but it is definitely a usability issue for Japanese app names.

Possible improvements

Any of the following would significantly improve usability:

  1. Show the original app name (Unicode) in email notifications.

  2. If romanization is required, display both:

    • Original: ステークホルダー生成

    • Romanized: (whatever system format is used)

  3. Add a setting to control how app names appear in emails (original only / romanized only / user-specified ).

Closing

This seems like a small change, but it would meaningfully improve the experience for Japanese users who rely on Replit’s email notifications in day-to-day development and operations.

Thanks for reading, and I’m happy to provide more examples if helpful.