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API Integration and Networking Questions

Making and managing network requests to external services and third party APIs, including HTTP fundamentals and REST principles. Topics include constructing requests, headers and authentication schemes such as token handling and refresh flows, parsing and serializing JSON, handling HTTP status codes, network error handling, timeout and retry strategies, backoff, offline and caching strategies, security concerns such as HTTPS and certificate pinning, and familiarity with common networking libraries on different platforms. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to integrate external APIs reliably and securely and to reason about networking trade offs.

MediumTechnical
45 practiced
When integrating a GraphQL API in a mobile app, how do you handle caching, pagination, and offline mutations? Mention concrete libraries (Apollo for iOS/Android), explain normalized caching, optimistic updates, conflict resolution strategies, and how to persist cache to disk for offline use.
HardTechnical
40 practiced
Design and provide Kotlin pseudocode for a retry framework that treats idempotent and non-idempotent operations differently. For non-idempotent operations, send an idempotency key header the first time and persist keys across restarts if retries may continue after process restart. Include backoff strategy, max attempts, and strategy for cleaning up persisted keys.
HardTechnical
40 practiced
Analyze trade-offs between HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 for mobile clients. Discuss multiplexing, header compression (HPACK), connection lifetime and keep-alive behavior, battery and CPU implications, proxy/middlebox compatibility, and how HTTP/3/QUIC might change your recommendation. Provide scenarios where HTTP/2 helps and where it might introduce problems.
EasyTechnical
34 practiced
List and describe three common client-side error-handling strategies when an API returns a non-200 HTTP response. For each strategy provide a mobile-specific example (UI feedback, retry, fallback content) and explain when it is appropriate to use each approach.
EasyTechnical
63 practiced
In Swift (5+), design Codable structs to represent a User with fields: id (Int), name (String), email (String or null), and metadata.last_login (ISO 8601 string). Show how you'd fetch and decode this User using URLSession, handle a missing/null email gracefully, and call a completion handler on the main thread with proper error handling.

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