iOS interview books, and which one fits your loop
For iOS engineers choosing one book for an interview that is already on the calendar. This page says which title fits how much time you have left, what each one covers, what none of them covers, and where the free samples are. Choose by the date of the interview, not by the topic list.
Choose by the time you have left
The interview is tomorrow, or in a few hours. The 24-Hour iOS Interview Answer Book. It is built to be triaged, not read: a 2-hour crash path, the ten answers you must not get wrong, and a final 30-minute review for the morning of. Ten cards you can say out loud are worth more than a hundred you have read once.
You have a week. Still the answer book first: the Top 50 questions most likely to decide the loop, the fifteen that separate senior from mid-level answers, then one live simulation in your weakest area. If a whole area is weak rather than one answer, add the matching chapter of the Blueprint.
You have a month or more. The iOS Interview Blueprint. Read the chapter for the level you are interviewing at end to end, then skim the level above it to see what the interviewer will expect next. Use the answer book in the last week to turn it into spoken answers.
You know the material and lose it in live rounds. Share Your Screen. It trains the round where you build while someone watches: narration, stalls, recovery, and grading your own recording so the interviewer is not the first to grade it.
The role is SwiftUI-heavy. SwiftUI Under Load is not an interview book in format. It is the production depth behind the senior SwiftUI questions: identity, ownership, cancellation and performance under real data.
System design or Staff. Add Mobile System Design Blueprint for the design round, and Altitude if the role is Staff or lead. Both are cross-platform and assume the iOS depth is already there.
The books side by side
| Book | Use it when | What it covers | Price | Free sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The 24-Hour iOS Interview Answer Book | The loop is within a week | 157 answer cards across 16 areas with spoken wording, traps and follow-ups; a ranked Top 50 with the interviewer push and a recovery line on each, five live simulations, a 2-hour crash path and a morning-of checklist | $89 | |
| The iOS Interview Blueprint | You have weeks, and the whole loop matters | Chapters by career level, from junior to engineering manager, with each question answered at three depths, plus a chapter on the live coding round and take-homes | $59 | |
| Share Your Screen | A live coding, code review, take-home or design round is booked | The performance side: what to say while you build, recovering from a stall, annotated mock interviews, a companion Swift package with tests | $299 | |
| SwiftUI Under Load | The role is SwiftUI-heavy and the questions go past the basics | 36 chapters on SwiftUI under production load: identity, state ownership, concurrency, performance, migration from UIKit, testing | From $99 | |
| The iOS Engineer Playbook | You are still looking, or you have an offer to weigh | The whole career arc: getting found, interviewing with structure, negotiating and starting the role | $99 | |
| Mobile System Design Blueprint | System design is an explicit round | Decision chapters and system scenarios on evolving, migrating, releasing and operating mobile systems | From $199 | |
| Altitude | The role is Staff, lead or architect | The systems around the app: backend for frontend, sync, security, observability, architecture reviews | $259 |
Prices are the Gumroad prices when this page was built. Gumroad shows the current price at checkout.
What none of them covers
- Algorithm grinding. None of these is a LeetCode-style problem set. The Blueprint and Share Your Screen cover the algorithm round as it appears in iOS loops, which is narrower; a big-tech generalist screen needs separate practice.
- Learning iOS. These books assume you have shipped iOS code. They make what you know usable under pushback; they do not teach your first app.
- Practise out loud. Reading an answer is not the same as producing it while someone changes the constraint. Interview Runtime is the separate practice product for iOS and Android.
- A single handbook for everything. Each title is built for one amount of time or one kind of round. That is deliberate: the week before a loop is the wrong time to read five hundred pages.
Read a sample first
If you are not sure, read before you buy. Every iOS title has a free sample of real pages, linked in the table above. If you would rather have a recommendation than a comparison, build a prep plan in four questions: it asks about your loop and names one book or guide, with the reason.
For the free material first, the guides go deep on single rounds: senior iOS interview questions, the iOS technical interview, the iOS coding interview and iOS system design.