The interview process was smooth and friendly. I had a great technical conversation with the team and felt genuinely excited about the role. Here's how the process went:

• The recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn.
• He followed up with a quick 5–10 minute phone screening.
• I had a 1-hour interview with the hiring manager.
• A week later, I completed a technical round where I solved two problems (1 hour).
• This was followed by a panel interview consisting of 3 rounds, each 1 hour, spread over two weeks.
• Finally, the recruiter called again and mentioned that they’d share the outcome soon.

However, the offer that followed was significantly below market expectations. I had clearly communicated both my current compensation and what I was looking for. After that call, I didn’t hear back for several weeks despite multiple follow-ups. When the recruiter finally responded, I was told no adjustments could be made. The lack of transparency and delayed communication — especially at the final offer stage — was disappointing, particularly coming from a company like Apple. Ultimately, I had to decline. A more thoughtful candidate experience would’ve made a real difference.

Write a function that takes an array and returns it in reverse order without using built-in reverse methods.

A disguised topological sort problem. I was given a list of app actions like ["Swipe up to Home", "Search 'Photos'", "Tap on Search Bar", "Click Download", "Launch App"] and a set of order constraints like ["Launch App, Tap on Search Bar", "Tap on Search Bar, Search 'Photos'", "Click Download, Swipe up to Home"]. The task was to return any valid sequence of the actions that satisfied all the given constraints, outputting them as a single string joined by " - ".

Database join table kind of problem. But not in the technical interview. The hiring manager asked me to form an abstract query to join data from two tables with distinct items.

Why are you choosing Apple?