Android interview questions and answers cover basic concepts like activities and intents to advanced concepts such as Kotlin coroutines, activity lifecycle, RecyclerView , and more. This blog includes critical skills Android developers require and their job responsibilities for effective interview preparation. Additionally, it offers valuable tips on cracking Android interviews, FAQs, and more.
Statista states Android will have the largest market share among mobile operating systems worldwide in 2024. It shows the operating system's wide use and subsequent job opportunities in many reputed companies worldwide.
In this article, MindMajix offers Android Interview Questions 2024 that help you crack your Android interviews and acquire a dream career as an Android Developer. It includes the questions and answers for all types of learners, including freshers and beginners.
If you're looking for Android Interview Questions for Experienced or Freshers, you are in right place. There are a lot of opportunities from many reputed companies in the world. According to research, Android has a market share of about 0.7%. So, You still have the opportunity to move ahead in your career in Android Development. Mindmajix offers Advanced Android Interview Questions 2024 that help you in cracking your interview & acquire a dream career as Android Developer.
Table of Contents:
In this section, we will learn the primary and secondary skills required for Android developers before diving into the Android interview questions and answers.
Primary skills:
Secondary Skills:
Understanding the job responsibilities of Android developers will be highly useful. It will help you prepare for your interview more accurately.
Beginners:
Intermediate-level:
Expert level:
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This section is divided into three sections for beginners, intermediate learners, and experienced users. Based on your Android expertise, you can either jump into the correct section or walk through it individually.
Let’s begin!
In this section, you will learn the basic Android interview questions, strengthening your foundation on Android OS.
Ans: Android is an open-source, Linux-based operating system for developing mobile applications. It has a large ecosystem with excellent customisation options. We can seamlessly integrate Android applications with Google Drive, Google Maps, and other Google products.
Android supports Edge, Bluetooth, multiple 3G communication protocols, messaging, and more. It provides exceptional flexibility and affordability to its users. Above all, Google updates Android OS regularly, improving security and performance.
Ans: Android 15 (vanilla ice cream) is the latest Android version, released in October 2024.
Ans: Android 15 is the latest Android version, which has the following key features.
Ans: In its basic form, context in Android is an abstract class that connects an application with the Android system. Context acts as an interface and helps users access application-specific resources like themes, strings, etc.
We can use context to access resources, including colours, drawables, dimensions, etc. We can also start new activities in internal and external applications. The important thing is that to avoid leaks in contexts, we must include a reference to a context only if it is required.
Ans: A content provider is essentially an interface that connects data in one process to code in another process. It helps applications access, share, and modify data securely. It also acts as the central repository where data is stored in different formats, including databases, files, etc.
A content provider serves as a bridge between applications in exchanging data. It provides granular control over accessing data with permissions. For example, it can control which application can access, read and modify data, ensuring security to greater levels.
Ans: Jotted down are the different image-loading libraries used in Android.
Ans: An activity is typically a single screen in an Android application with a user interface. Activities are the core building blocks of Android applications, and each screen has a purpose and interacts with users.
We embrace activities for handling user inputs, displaying information, and responding to events. Every activity has a life cycle: creation, display, pause, and destruction. Examples of activities are a login screen, signup screen, home screen, and more.
Ans: An Android app bundle is a publishing format containing an Android application's compiled codes. It delays signing in to Google and APK generation, which helps to reduce the application's download size.
App modules allow users to download only the necessary codes and resources for specific devices. They accelerate installations with smaller files and support developing applications that include all code and resources with configurations.
Ans: Below is an example of calling activity in Android.
Intent i = newIntent(getApplicationContext(), ActivityTwo.class);
startActivity(i);
Ans: ANR stands for Application Not Responding. Generally, this dialogue pops up in the Android system if an application performs too many tasks. Then, the application becomes unresponsive for quite a long time—to be precise, if it doesn't respond for more than five seconds during the ANR condition.
Android has many types of ANRs, including input ANR, Timeout ANR, Broadcast Receiver ANR, Service ANR, and timeout expired ANR.
Ans: The Android application architecture has many components. It includes:
Ans: APK is an abbreviation for the Android Packaging Kit, the file format for applications on the Android OS. An APK file contains the essential information for an application to operate on a device, including details about installing the application and the package.
We can create APK files in Android Studio. The good news is that we can also open APK files on Windows, MacOS, and Android platforms.
Ans: Intent is a messaging object that enables communication between the components of an Android application. In other words, we can use intent to request an action from another component in an application.
There are three primary uses of intent: starting an activity, starting a service, and delivering a broadcast receiver. For example, we can use intent to call a second activity from a first activity, send data to components, start services, etc.
Related Article: What is Android |
Ans: Yes, there are some specific names for different Android versions.
Ans: The prime reason for its popularity is free use. Furthermore, it comes with:
Ans: We can develop Android applications with C, C++, and Native Development Kit.
Ans: The core building blocks of Android are categorised into:
Ans: Android supports the following storage methods for storing data. Here we go:
Ans: Android supports the below media formats.
Ans: Regarding Android, the Linux 3.6 kernel can be used.
Ans: With widgets, we can easily embed small application views in other applications. This will periodically provide us with updates.
Ans: We can categorise flags into two types for running Android Applications:
Ans: Generally, Android apps can be developed using:
Ans: We adopt system-wide broadcast in Android to alert applications about system-wide events. In its basic form, a system-wide broadcast is a message that Android systems pass to applications with access to receive messages.
Related Article: Services in Android |
Ans: Below are some of the Jetpack libraries.
Ans: The Kotlin platform helps simplify the development of cross-platform projects. It significantly reduces code writing and allows the same code to be used on different platforms.
We can also develop mobile applications in Android Studio and use them on the iOS platform. It works because the iOS platform has a shared data access layer with Android.
Ans: Kotlin flows are types built on top of coroutines that deliver multiple values sequentially. In other words, flows are data streams we can compute asynchronously.
For example, we can use Kotlin flows to receive live updates from a database and make network requests to produce the next value without blocking the main thread.
Cheers! You have learned the basics of Android and are now ready to learn the advanced concepts.
In this section, you will jump into the Android QA covering advanced Android concepts.
Ans: Seven methods control this type of lifecycle. Android Activity's prime focus is creating a subclass of the ContextThemeWrapper class.
The Android activity consists of:
Ans: We must declare the activity in the AndroidManifest.xml file in the project to ensure that the system gets access to it. The manifest file is the central configuration file where we declare activities, properties, services, and content providers.
Android: name, Android: label, and Android: exported are the essential attributes we use to declare activities in the manifest file. Android: name specifies the class name of activities. Android: label provides the label for the activity. Finally, Android: exported is a control that we use to control external applications using the activity.
Ans:
Activities | Services |
They are interactive and user-facing. | They are non-interactive and run in the background. |
We can use activities only when there is continuous user input through UI. | We can use services even though there is no interaction with UI. |
The login screen and galley viewer are some examples of activities. They need continuous user inputs to continue. | Playing audio is an example of a service because users can use another app while playing audio. |
Ans: Android uses the Dalvik Virtual Machine platform. It certainly needs a bytecode for smooth functioning. To ensure all files are converted into Dalvik executable files, we need to convert Java class files into Dalvik. It can be done with the help of a tool known as 'dx'.
Ans:
Implicit Intent | Explicit intent |
It doesn't specify a component name. Although it defines a general action, the system should find a component to manage the intent. | It specifies the component to be launched within an application. |
For example, if we want to open a browser for a task, we don’t need to mention anything. The system will open a suitable browser relevant to the task. | For example, we can use explicit intent while navigating between activities in the same application. |
It is highly flexible since it allows systems to select components. | It is less flexible as we need to specify the target component. |
Ans: A description of the sender's intent requires action. It is included in syntax and comes with a description where the action is added to an intent filter.
Ans: The application must sign with the same certificate to ensure it shares the same user ID and Virtual Machine. It wil provide accurate results.
Ans: There is no way since the Android platform cannot effectively support JAR deployments. Applications packed in the Android Package are deployed for the Android platform with the help of Android Asset Packaging software.
Ans: A virtual resource called Drawable is used for different purposes, such as background, title, and other screen parts.
We must store the bitmaps for some resolutions in the Drawable subfolders. If such bitmaps are offered in other folders, the Android system will select the right option depending on the device's configuration.
Ans:
Ans: Here are the reasons why XML is used for frontend development in Android.
Ans: The garbage collector in Android frees unused objects from storage and allocates memory for further use. It is triggered when memory is scarce, or the heap size reaches its limit.
The garbage collector uses the mark-sweep algorithm to identify the objects that are no longer in use. There are two phases in the garbage collection: mark and sweep. The Garbage collection starts at the mark phase by marking every object it visits. In the sweep phase, the unused objects are removed collectively.
Related Article: Android Installation |
Ans: The following are the different ways we can optimise RecyclerView scrolling performance in Android.
Ans.
onCreate() | onStart() |
It is called when an activity is created | It is called when an activity is visible to users |
It is called when there is a screen rotation or system memory reclamation. | It is called when an activity enters the started state. |
It is responsible for initialising essential components, including layout inflation, retrieving references to UI elements, etc. | It initiates animations, play sounds and other visual or auditory cues. |
It supports setting up event listeners and performing other initialisation tasks. | It supports registering broadcast receivers, UI animations, and acquiring system resources. |
Ans. Singleton is essentially a design pattern we use in Android applications to create an item for once. In simple words, a singleton class has only one instance.
The important thing is that other classes and subclasses cannot create instances. A singleton class is globally accessible, so every class can use the singleton class instance.
There are a lot of advantages to using the singleton classes.
Ans. Below are the essential methods of a content provider.
Ans. Let’s discuss the different Android UI layouts.
Here are the advantages of using Kotlin for Android development.
Ans. A coroutine is a concurrent design pattern that simplifies asynchronous code execution. We use coroutines widely in Android development because they break down long-running tasks into simple ones.
Coroutines help avoid blocking the execution of the main thread and prevent your application from becoming unresponsive. Therefore, developers extensively use coroutines in app development to improve productivity.
Ans. We must follow the steps below to build CI/CD pipelines in Android.
Ans. Hilt is a dependency injection library that significantly reduces manual dependency injection by providing containers for every class.
Moreover, hilt provides compile-time correctness, runtime performance, scalability and more.
Congrats! Now that you have gained expertise in Android concepts, it's time to explore its deeper dimensions.
In this section, you will travel through the crucial QA that will provide you with a holistic knowledge of the Android platform.
Ans. The key components of Android architecture include the following:
Ans: Every application project must include the Android manifest file. This file provides the necessary information about the application to Android build tools, the operating system, and Google Play.
The manifest file is required to declare the application components, permissions and the hardware /software features.
Ans: We need to store the crucial files and folders in the app directory. These include the androidmanifest.xml file, build.gradle files, the res folder for resources, the tests folder, and the Java folder for our source code.
Ans. Sensor, SensorManager, SensorEvent, and SensorEventListener are the key Java classes related to android sensors.
Ans. In Android, we use fragments to create dynamic user interfaces. The good thing about the fragment is that it simplifies building UIs for multiple screen sizes.
Every fragment has a lifecycle, including the methods below.
Ans. Generally, setContentView() is a heavy operation. We call setContentView() in onCreate() since we can call an activity's onCreate () only once. It is not advisable to call Setcontentview() in onResume() and onStart() because they are called multiple times.
Ans. Following is the step-by-step approach to creating a RecyclerView with multiple view types.
Ans. Below are the methods that help to handle different screen sizes in Android.
Ans. Below is the step-by-step procedure to build a custom view in Android.
Ans. We can implement animations in Android UI development in three ways as follows:
Ans. Each activity is tracked down in Android. It helps in mentoring the activity. It is categorised into three things. They are:
Ans. A dialogue box consists of some of the parts such as:
Ans. An application's name should be the same once it is deployed. It will break certain functions, and there is a huge risk involved. Supposedly, there will be no shortcuts that would work if we change the name applications of t. Of course, it is possible to change, but once the name is deployed, changing it makes no sense due to the huge loss risk.
Ans. Let’s see the causes of the occurrence of ANR and the ways to fix them.
Ans. In Android, there are two types of services: started and bound services. Let's examine them.
Ans. ContentResolver is essentially a class that allows applications to access content providers. In other words, it is an interface that provides various methods for applications to fetch, interact with, and edit content stored in applications, file systems, and APIs.
ContentResolver acts as a client that communicates with content providers to support data operations. It receives requests to access content providers and resolves them with full authority.
Like abstract methods such as insert, update, query, and delete used in content providers, we can apply the CRUD methods such as create, read, update and delete with ContentResolver.
Ans. Android Jetpack is a bundle of software components that includes tools, libraries, and more. We can leverage Android Jetpack to build robust Android applications.
Android jetpack has many vital components, including room, work manager, navigation, paging, lifecycle, ViewModel, live data, and more. Let's outline them in the following.
Ans. Jetpack Compose is a modern toolkit for Android developers to build native UI applications. This toolkit provides robust development tools, supports fewer codes, and offers Kotlin APIs.
Since Jetpack Compose supports fewer codes, we can easily avoid bugs and maintain codebases. It allows seeing live previews and supports Android Studio. Moreover, it provides built-in support for material design, dark themes, and animations.
Ans. We can optimise Android app performance in the following ways.
Ans. Retrofit is a networking library for managing network requests in applications. It is a type-safe networking and annotation-based library with simple syntax and better functionalities.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Celebrate! You have thoroughly learned the Android interview questions. Now, you can face your Android interviews and confidently bag your dream job.
Enriching your technical expertise plays a significant role in clearing your Android interviews. But that's not enough. The pointers below will help you crack the interviews on the first attempt.
Yes! If you apply these tips, your Android interview will be a breeze. You will crack your interviews on the first attempt.
Ans. Rich Miner, Chris White, Nick Sears, and Andy Rubin established Android Inc. in 2003. Google acquired the company in 2005. It released the first Android phone in 2008.
Ans.
Ans. Both Android and iOS have their pros and cons. Android excels in customisation, low cost, user-friendliness, cross-platform support, and other features. On the other hand, iOS excels in security, performance, quick app development, and other features.
Ans. Android symbolises a robot that looks like a human without emotions and feelings.
Ans. No, learning Android is easy. MindMajix offers job-oriented Android training by industry-experienced trainers for beginners and experienced learners. The training will provide you with the necessary skills to become a competent Android developer in your workplace.
Ans. MindMajix offers a 25-hour-long Android course by trainers with vast Android development experience. The training is delivered in instructor-led live classes and self-paced on-demand videos. You can choose the learning path based on your needs and convenience. So, you can master Android development in 25 hours by choosing MindMajix as your learning partner.
We hope that the Android interview questions and answers included in this section have provided you with a comprehensive knowledge of Android. The information about skills requirements, job responsibilities, and tips to crack android interviews might have been helpful to you.
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I am Ruchitha, working as a content writer for MindMajix technologies. My writings focus on the latest technical software, tutorials, and innovations. I am also into research about AI and Neuromarketing. I am a media post-graduate from BCU – Birmingham, UK. Before, my writings focused on business articles on digital marketing and social media. You can connect with me on LinkedIn.