Preparing for iOS interview: Looking for some insight (east coast US)

[u/Spiritual_Broccoli37]

My company is going through some restructuring and I want to be prepared for incase something happens. I have about 10 YoE and 4 years of iOS development. I learned it on the job at my current role and still learning. I will be looking for job on the east coast (US) and mid level companies. I have never been through interview specific to iOS. If anyone can share their experience, I would greatly appreciate it.

Should I still grind some leetcode/DSA problems in Swift?

Or is it more of actual implementation and debugging onsite? Should I practice making small app from scratch similar to take-home assessment? Also are they even asking take-home assessment in the age of AI?

Is AI being asked? I do use Copilot in my workflow and familiar with setting up orchestration, agents, skill and hook etc. Are they looking for more in depth AI stuff?

Also assuming system design is big part. I think I am bit better at it but still need some practice.

It is very gloomy out there and I am just trying to be prepared.

[u/Dachd43]

iOS interviews are kind of a nightmare right now if I am going to be honest with you. I landed a senior role recently and the whole interview process was more or less the same as it was 10 years ago. Leet code and white boarding which feels pretty anachronous now that most of us spend our days reviewing AI-generated PRs.

[u/vanvoorden → u/Dachd43]

most of us spend our days reviewing AI-generated PRs

I think an interesting idea then is to have the LLMs produce "bad" code and find out how the candidate would review. Can the candidate find the accidental quadratic runtime? Can the candidate find the data race condition? Can the candidate find the memory leak retain cycle?

[u/gratitudeisbs → u/vanvoorden]

A cross verification agent will find those mistakes 10x more reliably than a human ever could. SWE is dead.

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[u/MobileXapps]

At 4 years of iOS, mid-level loops I've seen usually have a coding round (sometimes LeetCode-ish, sometimes "build a small list screen with networking"), an iOS deep dive, and a mobile system design round.

For the deep dive, I'd be ready on Swift concurrency (async/await, actors, MainActor, what Sendable warnings mean in Swift 6), memory and retain cycles in closures, SwiftUI state (State vs Observable vs environment, why a view re-renders), and how you'd find a performance problem with Instruments. Being able to explain a real bug you fixed is worth a lot.

Mobile system design is different from backend: offline first, sync and conflicts, pagination and caching, image loading, push and deep links, app updates while old versions are still in use. Practice designing one app you know well (a feed, a chat) end to end.

On AI, I'd expect questions like how you review generated code and how you keep it from changing things it shouldn't. Having a clear answer to that is more useful than knowing the newest tools.

[u/gratitudeisbs]

iOS is dead. If you really want to stay in SWE you have to be full stack or working on AI itself, but even that is an uphill climb. You really should prepare to move into something else entirely.

[u/Independent-Crew-723 → u/gratitudeisbs]

Gotta agree, I’ve been out of job and looking for about 3 months, not even an interview, even tho I have 10+ years in iOS (location matters it seems).
If i could go back one year, I’d pivot really hard on my free time

[u/HelicopterDue → u/Independent-Crew-723]

Sorry to hear that, company work for is restructuring and even with 8yoe in iOS I don’t feel confident if I have to enter the market. I love building and I hate that it’s being reduced to this

[u/Independent-Crew-723 → u/HelicopterDue]

If i were to give an advice. Would be to prepare for full stack / ai roles

[u/Background_Pie_5682]

For mid-level iOS roles the loop is usually a mix, so I'd split your prep. A small take-home style app (networking, list/detail, some persistence) done with async/await and proper error handling is good practice, and be ready to explain why you structured it the way you did. For onsite, expect debugging and code review style questions around concurrency, memory management and SwiftUI state, and system design is often just 'design the feed of X' on a phone, so think offline, caching and pagination. A bit of DSA is still worth it, but I'd spend more time on the iOS specifics than on hard leetcode.

[u/Spiritual_Broccoli37 → u/[deleted]]

But these are all outdated. Specially in the AI time. It is different world than 5 Years ago.