Hiring can be a lot like gambling. You are betting your money, your time, and your sanity on a stranger. And when it comes to mobile app developers, the stakes are even higher.
If you hire a bad writer, you get a bad blog post. You can delete it. But if you hire a bad developer, you get “spaghetti code.” You get an app that crashes when more than ten people use it. You get a product that is technically “finished” but practically useless. And you can’t just delete it; you often have to burn it down and start over.
Most founders and managers are terrible at interviewing. They ask generic questions they found on Google. They ask about strengths and weaknesses. They waste an hour talking about hobbies.
You don’t have time for that. You need to know if this person can build. And you need to know it fast.
This is a framework to vet mobile app developers in exactly 45 minutes. No fluff. No logic puzzles about moving Mount Fuji. Just the raw truth about their skills.
The Reality of the Mobile App Development Company Model
Before we examine the questions, we need to consider the context.
If you go to a traditional mobile app development company, they have a team. They have layers of management. They (supposedly) vet their people. However, if you are hiring directly or building your own team, you are the filter.
The market is flooded. Everyone who took a three-week bootcamp thinks they are a senior engineer. Your job is to filter out the pretenders from the professionals.
You are not looking for someone who knows the syntax of Swift or Kotlin. You can Google syntax. You are looking for someone who understands architecture. You are looking for an engineer, not just a typist.
Phase 1: The Portfolio Interrogation (Minutes 0–10)
Most people look at a portfolio and say, “Oh, pretty pictures.” Stop doing that.
Anyone can download a template and make it look nice. A pretty UI does not mean the code works.
When you are interviewing mobile app developers, use the first ten minutes to audit their reality. Pick one app from their resume—preferably the most complex one—and ask them to open it.
If they can’t show it to you live (on a phone or a simulator), that is a red flag.
The Magic Question: “Tell me about the hardest bug you faced in this specific app, and exactly how you fixed it.”
Listen to their answer.
The Amateur says: “I had a layout issue with a button.” (This is trivial).
The Pro says: “We had a memory leak when the user scrolled through the video feed, causing the app to crash on older devices. I had to refactor how we handled background threads to fix it.”
See the difference? One is visual; the other is structural.
You want to hear about pain. Development is painful. If they can’t describe a war story, they haven’t been to war.
Phase 2: Architecture and Decision Making (Minutes 10–20)
Now that you know they have built something, you need to know how they think.
Many bad mobile app developers just copy-paste code from Stack Overflow until it works. They don’t know why it works. They just know the error message went away.
You need to test their intent.
Key Interview Questions for App Developers in this Phase:
- “Why did you choose this specific database for local storage?”
- “How do you handle offline mode? If the user loses internet, what happens to the data?”
- “Explain your choice of state management. Why did you use Redux/Bloc/Context instead of something else?”
If their answer is “Because that’s what the tutorial used,” pass. You want an answer like, “We needed real-time updates, so we chose a reactive database, even though it added complexity.”
This separates the thinkers from the copy-pasters. A great mobile app development company trains its staff to think about these trade-offs. If you are hiring a solo dev, they need to have that discipline built in.
Phase 3: The “Live” Problem Solving (Minutes 20–35)
This is the meat of the interview. But please, for the love of code, do not ask them to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard. They will never do that in real life.
Give them a real scenario.
The Scenario: “I want to build a feed like Instagram. It has images, text, and videos. It needs to scroll infinite. How would you design the data loading so the phone doesn’t freeze?”
This is a classic problem for mobile app developers. It tests:
- Pagination: Do they know not to load 10,000 items at once?
- Caching: Do they know how to save images so they don’t re-download every time?
- Concurrency: Do they understand how to load data in the background without blocking the UI?
Watch them draw it out or explain it.
You aren’t looking for perfect code here. You are looking for the “Gotchas.” Does the candidate ask, “What happens if the image is too large?” Does the candidate ask, “Do we need to optimize for low battery mode?”
The best interview questions for app developers aren’t questions you ask them. They are the questions they ask you. A senior developer clarifies the requirements before they write a single line of code. A junior developer just starts typing.
Phase 4: The “Oh No” Scenario (Minutes 35–40)
Things break. APIs fail. Apple rejects your app.
You need to know how this person handles a crisis. You don’t want a developer who panics. You want a firefighter.
Ask this: “The app is live. Users are reporting a crash on the login screen, but you can’t reproduce it on your device. What do you do?”
This tests their debugging process.
- Do they look at the crash logs?
- Do they use analytics tools?
- Do they ask the user for their device model?
If their answer is “I don’t know, I guess I’d look at the code,” that is not good enough. You want a systematic approach. “First, I check the crash reporting tool like Crashlytics. Then I look at the stack trace. Then I try to replicate the environment.”
This is crucial because, in a remote setting, you cannot look over their shoulder. If you are using a service like Remote Resource, we ensure our talent has this crisis management protocol ingrained in them. But if you are hiring on your own, you have to verify it yourself.
Phase 5: Cultural Fit and Communication (Minutes 40–45)
You have five minutes left. You know they can code. You know they can think. Now, can you stand working with them?
This is often overlooked by technical founders. They think, “He is a genius, who cares if he is rude?” You will care. You will care when it is 10 PM and he refuses to explain why the build failed.
Ask them: “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a designer or a product manager. Who won, and why?”
You are looking for ego. If they say, “The designer was wrong, so I just built it my way,” that is a toxic employee. If they say, “We discussed it, and I explained the technical limitations, so we found a middle ground,” that is a professional.
Mobile app developers do not work in a vacuum. They are part of a chain. If they break the chain, the product fails.
The Problem with Doing This Alone
If you read this framework and thought, “Wow, that sounds exhausting,” you are right. It is exhausting.
To hire one great developer, you usually have to interview twenty bad ones. That is 20 hours of your life gone. That is 20 hours you aren’t spending on sales, or marketing, or strategy.
And even if you do everything right, you might still miss something. Maybe they were great in the interview, but lazy on the job. Maybe they have a second full-time job you don’t know about.
This is why the traditional hiring model is breaking. It is too slow and too risky.
The Alternative: The Remote Resource Model
We built Remote Resource because we hated this process too.
We realized that businesses don’t want to be professional interviewers. They just want the code written. They want the app launched.
At Remote Resource, we do the 45-minute interview. And the 90-minute technical assessment. And the background check. And the reference check.
We act as the filter.
When you look for a mobile app development company, you usually pay a massive premium for their brand name. When you look for freelancers, you pay with your time and risk.
Remote Resource sits in the middle. We provide pre-vetted, high-level talent that plugs directly into your team. We have already asked the hard interview questions for app developers. We have already checked their architecture skills. We have already verified they can handle a crisis.
You skip the 20 bad interviews and go straight to the one good hire.
The Bottom Line
You can have the best idea in the world. You can have the best marketing budget. But if your mobile app developers are mediocre, your product will be mediocre.
The code is the foundation. If the foundation is weak, the house falls.
Don’t rush the hire, but don’t waste time on fluff. Be direct. Be technical. And if you don’t have the time or the expertise to do that, find a partner who does.
Whether you build your internal team or leverage Remote Resource for instant scalability, the goal is the same: Get the best talent, get them fast, and get to work.
Everything else is just noise.
