Product design question
How would you redesign the Apple App Store?
- Apple
- Product design
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Product sense for a mature marketplace platform, balancing discovery for users against fairness for developers.
How to approach it
- Identify the core problem, discovery is hard for smaller developers since the store favors large, already popular apps in rankings and featured spots.
- Pick a specific user to design for, someone looking for a niche utility app rather than a top mainstream app they already know.
- Propose a redesign, improved search relevance and a similar apps you might not have found section based on real usage similarity, not just category.
- Address the developer side, more transparent ranking factors so smaller developers can understand what improves visibility.
- Define success metrics, search to install conversion rate and the diversity of apps installed across users, not just top chart concentration.
What a strong answer includes
- Names the real structural problem, discovery bias toward already popular apps, rather than proposing generic visual redesign changes.
- Proposes a concrete mechanism, similarity based recommendations using real usage co occurrence data, distinct from simple category browsing.
- Balances both sides of the marketplace explicitly, adding a developer facing transparency metric alongside a user facing diversity metric.
Common mistakes
- Focusing only on visual or UI redesign with no attention to the underlying discovery and ranking problem.
- Ignoring the developer side of the marketplace entirely.
- No metric to measure whether discovery for smaller apps actually improved.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent this from being gamed by developers optimizing for the new ranking signal?
- How would the company balance this against its own revenue from featured placements?
More product design questions
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- You are a PM at Apple. How would you design a feature for the iPhone that enhances accessibility for users with disabilities?Apple · Product design · Medium
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- How would you improve Apple Podcast?Apple · Product design · Easy
- As a PM at Apple, you are tasked with delivering the new version of iOS 19. What features would you prioritize and why?Apple · Product design · Hard
More questions from Apple
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