I applied online.

It took about a month from start to finish. The first step was a 30-minute call with the hiring manager. They mostly just wanted to see if I was a fit for their specific team's product, since Apple hires for specific teams and not a general pool.

After that was a standard 45-minute technical phone screen mostly around data structures with some Swift ques. The virtual onsite is pretty exhausting IMO. It was five rounds. You get your standard LC style coding rounds, but the real test is the iOS domain and app sys design interviews.

For the design round, I’d say don't waste time drawing backend databases. They only care about mobile architecture like how you manage state, handle local storage, and deal with memory limits. The domain rounds test your core knowledge heavily. Expect them to ask a lot about ARC, UIKit vs SwiftUI lifecycles, and concurrency (GCD vs async/await).

Then there is this behavioral round focusing on how you handle pushback from designers, past project failures, and if you actually care about user experience and design quality. For prep, stop practicing standard backend design and focus strictly on mobile constraints.

I booked a mock interview on Prepfully with an Apple engineer before the onsite. It honestly saved my app architecture round and showed me what I was missing on concurrency. Also skimmed through Reddit and Blind a lot to understand this very structure of the interview.

How would you handle race conditions when dealing with threads in an iOS application?