Great Android interview questions?

Question

What interview questions would you ask to distinguish great Android developers from the masses?

Answer 1

Do you own an iPhone =P

Answer 2

Ask them generic coding, algorithm and design questions. If they can write good code, they can learn Android. See:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2114212/questions-every-good-java-j2ee-developer-should-be-able-to-answer

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/64856/senior-j2ee-interview-questions

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72183/any-good-interview-questions-to-ask-prospective-junior-java-developers

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java+interview-questions

edit: If you really care about previous Android experience, ask them to show you a demo of apps they have created. During the demo, you can ask them how they implemented specific features.

Answer 3

No interview required, just read their ratings/reviews on the Android Market.

Answer 4

If this is an Android specific job, just ask the obvious stuff.

• Application lifecycle
• When to use a service
• How to use a broadcast receiver and register it both in the manifest and in code
• Intent filters
• Stuff about what manifest attributes and tags mean
• The types of flags to run an application
  • FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK
  • FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP
  • etc
• How to do data intensive calculations using threads
• Passing large objects (that can't be passed via intents and shouldn't be serialized) via a service
• Binding to a service and the service lifecycle
• How to persist data (both savedInstanceState and more permanent ways)

Just go through http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html and see what sounds like it's important. Hopefully you're an android developer and know what all those things are, otherwise you're just waiting your interviewee's time =P

But like @Mayra said. A lot of android can be picked up fairly quickly if they're experienced programmers. If you just ask android specific questions, you'll get people who started off with android and that could be bad.