Product design question
How would you improve the App store?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product improvement thinking on a marketplace product: balancing user discovery needs against developer and platform incentives.
How to approach it
- Clarify which store and platform, since Google Play differs from Apple's App Store in openness and policy.
- Identify users: app seekers who want trustworthy, relevant apps, and developers who want fair visibility and clear review guidance.
- Name the pain point: search and browse often surface low quality or near duplicate apps over well built smaller ones.
- Propose an improvement: stronger quality and safety signals in ranking, such as crash rate and update recency, weighted alongside downloads.
- Prioritize this over cosmetic changes since trust in search results drives both downloads and developer retention.
- Define success as search to install conversion and post-install 30 day retention of newly discovered apps.
What a strong answer includes
- Targets a specific failure mode, for example clone apps outranking the original due to keyword stuffing, rather than a generic redesign.
- Balances two sided incentives: better ranking signals must not simply favor incumbents with more historical downloads.
- Proposes a measurable change, weighting crash-free rate and update recency into ranking, with an assumed uninstall rate baseline to compare against.
Common mistakes
- Proposing only a visual redesign without addressing trust or discovery quality.
- Ignoring the developer side of the marketplace and its incentives.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you detect and penalize apps gaming your new ranking signals?
- How would small developers react to this change versus large incumbents?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
More questions from Google
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop