Design a food delivery mobile app like Swiggy
PremiumMobile systemMedium
- Menu caching
- Cart persistence
- Idempotent checkout
Quick answer
This mobile system interview question asks you to design a food delivery mobile app like Swiggy. 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 customer mobile app of a food delivery service like Swiggy for Android and iOS. Users browse nearby restaurants, build a cart, pay and track the order until it arrives. The hard parts are fast menus on cheap phones, a cart that stays right when prices change, checkout that never orders twice and tracking with the app closed.
Restaurant search, dispatch and payments run on the server and in payment apps. Design the customer app.
What must a food delivery mobile app like Swiggy do?
- Browse: Nearby restaurants and their menus load quickly and work from cache for recently viewed ones.
- Cart: The cart survives app restarts; price or stock changes are shown before payment, never after.
How well must it do it?
- Never order twice: Retries, double taps and lost payment results never create two orders.
- Fast on cheap phones: Menu visible in under 2 seconds on a 3 GB Android phone on 3G.
What scale should you design for?
Use these numbers in your estimates.
The scale numbers unlock with this questionUnlock
Key concepts
- Menu caching
- Cart persistence
- Idempotent checkout
- Order tracking
- Live activities
- Etag revalidation
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 food delivery mobile app like Swiggy 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