Swift shows up in 5.4% of Stack Overflow survey responses—smaller than cross-platform stacks, but dominant for native iOS hiring (Stack Overflow 2025 Technology). Apple’s platform moves fast; you need candidates who ship reliably, not just complete tutorials.
These five questions test memory and concurrency judgment, UI toolkit choices, testing discipline, and release experience—not whether they can name every Swift keyword.
1. “Explain a retain cycle you found in production. How did you break it?”
Strong candidates discuss delegates, closures, and [weak self] with context—not blanket rules. Weak answers claim ARC “just works.”
2. “How do you structure async work with Swift concurrency—and what do you still run on the main actor?”
Listen for async/await, task cancellation, and UI isolation. You learn whether they have migrated real code or only read release notes.
3. “When do you choose SwiftUI vs UIKit for a new screen—and when do you mix them?”
Hybrid apps are normal. Good answers cover team skill, OS support, performance needs, and incremental adoption.
4. “How do you test networking or persistence without hitting live services in CI?”
Protocol-based seams, fakes, and snapshot boundaries reveal maintainable iOS work—not manual QA only.
5. “Walk me through your last App Store release. What could have gone wrong?”
Release questions surface provisioning, feature flags, crash monitoring, and rollback thinking. Strong candidates name a concrete checklist.
Turn answers into comparable evidence
Capture one memory fix, one concurrency choice, one UI toolkit decision, and one release story per finalist.
One scorecard for every finalist
Use the same five questions for each candidate for this opening. Consistent questions support consistent evaluation, which aligns with EEOC guidance for employers to apply the same standards to applicants for the same position (EEOC).
Use Canvider JobCraft to lock iOS/Swift requirements in the JD, InterviewGen for gap-based follow-ups, and DecisionHelper to compare finalists on the criteria you published.
Next step: Explore InterviewGen and DecisionHelper, then get started free.