What do you enjoy more: architecture, UI, animations, optimization?
What is being assessed
Self-awareness: do you know your strengths and do they match the role. There is no "right" answer, but there are wrong ones: "I like everything equally" (you don't know yourself) and "only architecture, I don't like UI" (when the role is about UI).
Answer skeleton
- Name your strength honestly and explain why it interests you.
- Back it with an example from experience, with a result.
- Show breadth: you do the rest too, and do it well, with an example.
- Tie it to the role: which of these the job needs and how you will cover it.
Example answer
"Optimisation and anything performance-related most of all. I like that the result is measurable: open Instruments, find that 60% of scroll time goes to decoding images on the main thread, move it to a background task with downsampling — and the hitch rate drops from 12% to 1%. There's a satisfaction in a concrete effect.
That said, for the past year I mostly wrote UI in SwiftUI: I built a design system with components and transition animations, so layout and animations are a working tool, not a weak spot. I made architectural decisions at module level: introduced coordinators and protocols for the network layer.
As I understand it, you currently have smoothness problems in the feed on older devices — that's exactly the task I'd pick up first."