You are the PM for TikTok's Android app. The app's Play Store rating has dropped drastically from 4.2+ to 2 in India in less than a week's time. It is mostly due to a surge of trolls downrating the app. What is your plan of action?

In order to help answer this question, let’s put a structure in place that can give us a framework to approach the problem.

Clarifying questions
Goal of the company
Problem at hand and impact
Solutions and prioritization
Metrics for success
Summary

Clarifying questions:
1. How long has this been happening? – The ratings have crashed in the last week, but let’s say that the issue of trolls downrating the app has been happening for the last 1 month.
2. Is this happening only across Android or even iOS? - Only Android.
3. What is the impact of this? – Is this only mean that people are not downloading it or is there a risk of being removed from the app store? – Assume that if this falls below 2, then there is a risk of being removed from the App Store and that obviously impacts $$$.
4. What portion of the user base is on Android and what is the growth rate? – Assume 60% of the user base is on Android and the YoY growth is around 20% and expected to remain steady.
5. Is there any impact to existing customers who have download the app? Such as uninstalls, inability to upgrade etc.? – Assume no impact.
4. Are there any constraints that I should be aware of? – Assume nothing else.

Goal of the Company:
The goal of TikTok is to help promote creativity and spread joy -Hence, even keeping business metrics aside, it is imperative that we resolve this problem.

Problem at hand and Impact:
As stated, trolls are intentionally providing low/bad ratings for the app on Android play store since the last two weeks that has brought the overall rating of the app dangerously close to the breaking point of being removed from the App store.
Impact: this impacts the ability for new creators or consumers from downloading the app which in turn affects the long term revenue of the product.

Apart from this, it also affects the reach of content creators and sellers who might want to specifically target new users on the platform for their content or for shopping. This could cause content creators and advertisers to shift their time to other growing apps. This will again impact the revenue of TikTok down the line.

Real world impact to key business metrics such as customer acquisition, reactivation and growth.

What can we do?
Before we get into solutions, we need to first understand why Trolls might be doing this to the app on the play store?

You cannot rate an app if you do not download it – So, it would be interesting to see users who have downloaded the app from the play store in the last 2 weeks on android and see usage patterns. Typically, trollers would be the ones that download and do nothing else just so that they can give a bad review-  we can correlate the download data for the app in the same time period and see if that is the case – if it is – then we know what we are dealing with.
We can work with Google to share this list of potential fraudsters and maybe get some data on average rating – if this can be shared.

To be on the safe side, I would also check a few things:

External factors -
1. Is there another app that competes in the same space that these trolls want to promote and users to download instead?
2. Was there some bad press about TikTok that has caused this – maybe some reports saying that there are specific things about TikTok and Android that caused this?
3. Was there an issue with Google Review system that erroneously reported this and caused the average rating to go down?

Internal Factors -
1. Was there an issue with the build on the play store for Android app that is causing this?
2. Was there some funnel issue that caused bad rating such as app not opening or unable to register or something – if so, I would try and fix that as well.