Apple Software Developer Interview Questions and Answers

Round duration - 120 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

This was an online coding round where we had 3 questions to solve under 120 minutes. The questions were of medium to hard difficulty level.

Q1. 
Minimum Time in Wormhole Network
Determine the minimum time required to travel from a starting point to a destination point in a two-dimensional coordinate system, considering both direct movement and the...read more
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Q2. 
Substrings Differ by One Problem Statement
Ninja needs help in a battle against the string man. Given two strings, 'S' and 'T', the task is to find the number of substrings in 'S' that differ from some su...read more
Ans. 
The task is to find the number of substrings in 'S' that differ from some substrings of 'T' by exactly one character.
• Iterate through all substrings of 'S' and 'T' and compare them character by character to find the ones that differ by exactly one character.

• Use nested loops to generate all possible substrings of 'S' and 'T'.

• Count the number of substrings that differ by exactly one character and return the total count.
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Q3. 
Power of Two Problem Statement
Determine whether a given integer N is a power of two. Return true if it is, otherwise return false.
Explanation
An integer 'N' is considered a power of two if it can be e...read more
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

This round had 2 questions related to DSA where I was first expected to explain my approaches and then discuss the time and space complexities of my solution. After that , I was asked some core concepts related to OS.

Q1. 
Reverse Linked List Problem Statement
Given a singly linked list of integers, return the head of the reversed linked list.
Example:
Initial linked list: 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> NULL
Reversed link...read more
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Q2. 
Cycle Detection in Undirected Graph Problem Statement
You are provided with an undirected graph containing 'N' vertices and 'M' edges. The vertices are numbered from 1 to 'N'. Your objective is to determi...read more
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Q3. What are the differences between a mutex and a semaphore?
Ans. 
Mutex is used for exclusive access to a resource by only one thread at a time, while semaphore can allow multiple threads to access a resource simultaneously.
• Mutex is binary semaphore with ownership, used for mutual exclusion.

• Mutex is typically used to protect critical sections of code.

• Semaphore is a signaling mechanism, used for synchronization between multiple threads.

• Semaphore can have a count greater than 1, allowi...read more
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Q4. What is meant by multitasking and multithreading in operating systems?
Ans. 
Multitasking refers to the ability of an operating system to run multiple tasks concurrently, while multithreading involves executing multiple threads within a single process.
• Multitasking allows multiple processes to run simultaneously on a single processor, switching between them quickly to give the illusion of parallel execution.

• Multithreading involves breaking a process into multiple threads that can be executed ind...read more
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

This round had 2 Algorithmic questions wherein I was supposed to code both the problems after discussing their
approaches and respective time and space complexities . After that , I was grilled on some OOPS concepts related to C++.

Q1. 
Trapping Rain Water Problem Statement
You are given a long type array/list ARR of size N, representing an elevation map. The value ARR[i] denotes the elevation of the ith bar. Your task is to determine th...read more
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Q2. 
Find The Repeating And Missing Number Problem Statement
You are provided with an array nums which contains the first N positive integers. In this array, one integer appears twice, and one integer is missi...read more
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Q3. What is the Diamond Problem in C++ and how can it be resolved?
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Q4. What are friend functions in C++?
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