This guide covers everything you need to know before you start preparing for Android interviews. It’s the starting point for the 80-post interview prep series that follows — covering Technical, Kotlin, Compose, DSA, System Design, Architecture, Behavioral, and Coding Test rounds.
Most Android interview pipelines follow a similar structure, regardless of the company. You go through a screening round first, then technical rounds, and finally behavioral or cultural fit rounds. The number of rounds and depth changes depending on the company size, but the overall flow stays the same.
The typical pipeline looks like this:
How FAANG companies differ from startups:
At Google, the interview is heavy on DSA — expect medium to hard problems. They judge you on four areas: analytical ability, coding skills, experience, and communication. Amazon focuses on scalability, system design, and their leadership principles during behavioral rounds. Both have phone screenings followed by on-site rounds.
Startups tend to skip the hard DSA and focus on practical coding — take-home projects, pair programming, or extending an existing codebase. Indian companies like Flipkart, PhonePe, and Swiggy sit somewhere in the middle — they ask a mix of DSA and Android-specific questions with a system design round for senior roles.
Interviews test five things. Every round maps back to one or more of these:
What evaluators actually write in their scorecards:
From real assessment reviews — evaluators look at clean architecture, SOLID principles, proper use of Compose and Coroutines, error handling, and test coverage. They check naming conventions (like Given-When-Then for tests), whether you sort on a background thread instead of main, and whether your repository and use case layers are properly separated. A working app with poor architecture scores lower than a well-architected app that’s missing a minor feature.
They also note things you might not expect — whether your README is clear, whether your Git history tells a story, and whether you handled edge cases like empty states and network failures.
From application to offer, expect 3-6 weeks at most companies. Large companies like Google can take 6-8 weeks because of committee reviews.
A typical timeline:
Expect 4-6 total rounds at large companies and 3-4 at startups. Some companies do a take-home coding test instead of a live DSA round — this typically has a 3-6 hour time cap with 24-48 hours to submit. Live coding rounds are usually 45-60 minutes.
If you’re starting from scratch, plan for 8-10 weeks of focused preparation. If you’re already working as an Android developer, you can compress this to 6-8 weeks.
Phase 1: Foundations (2-3 weeks)
Cover the basics that every Android interview assumes you know. Activity and Fragment lifecycle, Android components (Services, Broadcast Receivers, Content Providers), Intents and launch modes, Views and RecyclerView internals, storage options, and networking with Retrofit and OkHttp. Also brush up on Kotlin fundamentals — type system, null safety, scope functions, collections, and generics.
These are the questions that come first in every interview. Getting them wrong early creates a bad impression that’s hard to recover from.
Phase 2: Deep Knowledge (2-3 weeks)
This is where you separate yourself from average candidates. Coroutines — structured concurrency, dispatchers, exception handling, supervisorScope. Flows — cold vs hot flows, StateFlow, SharedFlow, lifecycle-aware collection. Jetpack Compose — recomposition, stability, state management, side effects, modifiers, and how the Compose runtime works under the hood. Memory management, performance optimization, and Android internals like Zygote, Binder IPC, and ART.
Most candidates prepare Phase 1 well but don’t go deep enough in Phase 2. Interviewers use these topics to judge seniority.
Phase 3: System Design and DSA (2-3 weeks)
For system design, practice designing mobile apps end to end — how to handle offline sync, image loading, pagination, real-time updates, and API design. For DSA, focus on medium-difficulty problems first. Master arrays, strings, hash maps, linked lists, trees, graphs, and dynamic programming patterns. Practice writing code on a whiteboard or in a plain text editor without autocomplete.
Big O notation is non-negotiable. You need to analyze time and space complexity for every solution you propose.
Phase 4: Behavioral and Mock Interviews (1-2 weeks)
Prepare 5-6 STAR stories (Situation, Action, Result) covering: a challenging project, a conflict with a teammate, a failure and what you learned, mentoring someone, and pushing back on a requirement. Practice answering out loud — not in your head, out loud. The behavioral round is where many strong technical candidates lose offers because they ramble or give vague answers.
Do at least 2-3 mock interviews. Practice with a friend, a colleague, or an online mock interview platform. Hearing yourself answer questions reveals gaps you don’t notice when studying silently.
What to study from this series:
This interview prep series has 80 posts across 8 rounds, ordered from beginner to expert within each round. If you’re short on time, focus on Technical Round (posts 1-14), Kotlin Round (posts 1-10), and Behavioral Round (posts 1-4) first — these cover the highest-probability questions.
Google — Hard DSA problems, system design for mobile, and strong behavioral rounds. Expect linked list, tree, and graph problems at medium to hard difficulty. They care deeply about analytical thinking — explain your approach before writing code. Communication matters as much as the solution.
Meta — System design is weighted heavily for senior roles. Expect questions about designing a news feed, handling real-time updates, or building an offline-first app. Coding rounds focus on efficiency — they want optimal solutions, not just working ones.
Amazon — Leadership principles drive their behavioral rounds. Every answer should map to one of their 16 principles (ownership, customer obsession, bias for action). Technical rounds include scalability questions and system design focused on distributed systems and data flow.
Startups — Practical coding over theory. Take-home projects are common. They evaluate how you structure code, handle errors, write tests, and document decisions. The coding test often matters more than any other round. Some startups skip DSA entirely and focus on a pair-programming session where you extend a feature in their actual codebase.
Indian companies (Flipkart, PhonePe, Swiggy, Cred) — Mix of DSA and Android-specific questions. DSA difficulty is usually medium. Expect Android architecture questions, Kotlin coroutines deep dives, and a system design round for senior roles. Some include a machine coding round where you build a small app from scratch in 1-2 hours.
Not practicing out loud. You might know the answer in your head, but interviews test whether you can articulate it clearly under pressure. If you haven’t practiced saying your answers out loud, you’ll stumble, ramble, or freeze. Talk through problems as if someone is listening — because in the interview, they are.
Memorizing answers instead of understanding concepts. If you memorize that “StateFlow is a hot flow that replays the last value” without understanding why, you’ll fail the follow-up question. Interviewers go one level deeper. Understand the why behind every concept — why was it designed this way, what problem does it solve, what are the tradeoffs.
Ignoring the behavioral round. Many engineers spend weeks on DSA and zero time on behavioral questions. Then they give vague, unstructured answers in the behavioral round and lose the offer. The behavioral round has equal weight at most companies. Prepare for it like a technical round — with specific examples and practiced delivery.
Not asking questions back. When the interviewer asks “Do you have any questions?”, saying “No, I’m good” is a missed opportunity. Ask genuine questions — what’s the team working on, what are the biggest technical challenges, what does the tech stack look like. It shows interest and gives you information to evaluate the company.
Poor code quality in take-home assignments. No tests, no error handling, hardcoded API keys, a single “initial commit”, and no README. Evaluators see dozens of submissions. The ones that stand out have clean architecture, proper Git history, meaningful tests, and a README that explains trade-offs.
Before the interview — Test your setup if it’s a video call. Check your camera, microphone, and internet connection. Have a glass of water nearby. Keep your resume open in case they reference it. If it’s an on-site, arrive 10-15 minutes early.
During the interview — Think out loud. When you get a problem, don’t go silent for 3 minutes trying to figure out the perfect solution. Talk through your thought process — “I’m thinking about using a hash map here because we need O(1) lookups.” This gives the interviewer insight into how you think, and they can nudge you if you’re heading in the wrong direction.
Ask clarifying questions before jumping into a solution. “Should I handle the case where the list is empty?” “Can the input contain duplicates?” These questions show that you think about edge cases and don’t make assumptions.
Manage your time. In a 45-minute round, spend 5 minutes understanding the problem, 5 minutes planning your approach, 25 minutes coding, and 10 minutes testing and discussing tradeoffs. Don’t spend 30 minutes on a perfect solution for part 1 and run out of time for part 2.
When you don’t know something — say so honestly. “I haven’t worked with that API directly, but based on my understanding of how similar APIs work, I’d approach it like this.” Honesty is always better than guessing confidently. Interviewers respect self-awareness.
How to use this interview prep series:
This series has 80 posts organized into 8 rounds. Each round goes from beginner to expert difficulty. Start with the round that matches your weakest area, but if you’re not sure where to begin:
External resources worth your time:
Master Big O notation, practice medium and hard DSA problems, and do mock interviews. Make a list of your weak points and work on those first. Draft a good resume and keep it to one page. If you don’t get selected somewhere, ask when you can re-apply — most companies have a 6-12 month cooldown period.
Thank You!