Apple SDE2 Interview Guide
Evidence-backed preparation playbook for Apple SDE2 interviews. 6 reported questions, top topics, difficulty breakdown, and a free assessment.
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Top Questions — Ranked by Community Votes
These 6 questions appeared most in Apple SDE2 reports. Master these first.
Explain iOS memory management: ARC, strong/weak/unowned references, retain cycles. How does the system handle memory pressure? Walk through what happens when an app receives a memory warning and is then terminated.
Design iCloud Photo Library — 2 billion photos synced across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Cover: deduplication (perceptual hashing), delta sync (only changed chunks), offline-first with conflict resolution, and privacy — how Apple performs server-side processing without seeing unencrypted photos.
Design Apple Pay's tap-to-pay system. When a user taps their iPhone, a payment must complete in under 500ms even with no internet connection. Cover: secure element, tokenisation, NFC protocol, and offline authorisation.
Design Siri's speech recognition pipeline. Audio is captured on-device, processed, and a response is returned. How do you split on-device vs server processing to balance latency, privacy, and accuracy?
Apple is obsessed with privacy. Describe a feature you designed or could design where user privacy was a significant engineering constraint. How did you balance functionality with privacy?
How does Core Data work in iOS? Explain the managed object context, persistent store coordinator, and the fetch request pipeline. When would you use Core Data vs Realm vs SQLite directly?