Android Developer Summer Internship Interview Experience in a Startup

Company’s Background : The company is recently funded startup and their main focus is on sustainable energy.

Round 1 : Telephonic Interview (about 30 minutes)

The interview began with a formal greeting and a brief introduction about the company, which as always before any interview you should already have a good idea about (That’s your Homework before you even think about preparing for the interview). I knew about the company but I didn’t interrupt the interviewer as he was really excited in telling me about it.

I was asked in details about the projects I’ve done and also about the experience I have had in this domain.

I described in detail about what I’ve made till then. I recently started development in Android so I didn’t have much in my arsenal. I made a Drink(Water) reminder app, a clock app, an apk converter and a gym fitness app. I told him about every app in detail and he asked me a few questions in between about some functionality of the apps.

Then he said he will be asking some basic Android and Java questions.

Q-1 : How’s the following described layout will be made? A single row with “Name” on the left and “College” on the right and an explicit divider on the bottom.

Ans : A horizontal linear layout nested inside a vertical linear layout.

Q-2 : How can the divider be implemented aside from the default provided by the Recycler and List Views?

Ans :

1. We can use the View view in the XML file.
2. We can set the background color as what we want for the divider and then use padding for bottom.
3. We can use Images for the divider (vector, so as to preserve quality and avoid pixelation)

Q-3 : Fragment lifecycle methods or what are the methods that fragments have that an activity doesn’t?

Ans : Fragments also have onAttach() and onDetach() methods.

Q-4 : How recycler view works?

Ans : Google’s Documentation

Q-5 : continuing the previous one… What layouts the Adapter offer?

Ans : Linear Layout, Grid Layout and Staggered Layout

Q-6 : What are call back methods?

Ans ; The concept of callbacks is to inform a class synchronous / asynchronous if some work in another class is done. Some call it the Hollywood principle: “Don’t call us we call you. In simple words if a class needs to tell other class then it can be achieved by the callback method.

super method in many default methods are a callback method to the superclass of the aforementioned method.

Q-7 : What’s the difference between defining and declaring a variable?

Ans : Declaring a variable does not allocate the memory to the variable, it just states that the variable exists, whereas defining a variable also allocates the memory to the variable.

Q-8 : How to add and remove data from a List in android?

Ans : For adding elements dynamically, we should use ArrayList. It has pre-defined methods to add and remove data.

And then our interview ended with a Q&A round from my side.