Design a ride-hailing mobile app like Uber
PremiumMobile systemMedium
- Background location
- Foreground service
- Trip state machine
Quick answer
This mobile system interview question asks you to design a ride-hailing mobile app like Uber. Aim for a design that meets its requirements at the stated scale, then explain its main components, data flow and trade-offs. Interviewers want to see how you scope the problem, size it and defend each choice.
The problem
Design the rider and driver mobile apps of a ride-hailing service like Uber. The driver app streams GPS while it sits in the background behind a navigation app; the rider app shows the car moving smoothly and the trip status on the lock screen. The hard parts are background location limits, battery and recovering a trip after the app is killed.
Matching, pricing and routing run on the server and are a given API.
What must a ride-hailing mobile app like Uber do?
- Driver location: While online, the driver app sends its position every 4 seconds, including when it is in the background or the screen is locked.
- Live tracking: The rider sees the assigned car move smoothly on the map with an updated arrival time.
How well must it do it?
- Freshness: The rider's view of the driver lags reality by at most 5 seconds.
- Battery: The driver app uses under 10% battery per hour online, excluding the screen.
What scale should you design for?
Use these numbers in your estimates.
The scale numbers unlock with this questionUnlock
Key concepts
- Background location
- Foreground service
- Trip state machine
- Live activities
- WebSocket
- Location interpolation
How you’ll practise
- Requirements
- App architecture
- Data and offline sync
- Networking and push
- Performance, battery and releases
- Wrap-up
Lala, personalized to you, gives a hint when you ask and reviews your design when you are ready.
What do interviewers look for?
In any mobile system design round.
- Clarifies the requirements before drawing anything
- Uses a few numbers that actually change the design
- Draws a clear path from the client to storage
- Picks storage and caching with reasons, not by habit
- Explains what breaks first under load and how to fix it
- States trade-offs openly instead of claiming a perfect design
Questions people ask about this interview question
- Which design type is this question?
- It is a mobile system question. You design a ride-hailing mobile app like Uber and explain your choices the way you would in an interview.
- Is this question asked at entry level?
- It is marked Medium. Entry-level engineers can practise it, but it expects you to reason about requirements and trade-offs, not only list components.
- What should I cover first?
- Start with the requirements: what the system must do, how well it must do it and which numbers change the design. Agree on scope with the interviewer before you design anything.
- Can I practise it for free?
- It is a premium question. Sign up and unlock it once for 10 credits; it then stays unlocked. When you finish, Lala, your personalized AI mentor, can review your design for 30 credits.
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Updated · Written by the SevyDevy team