Mock system design interview at Apple

A live 45-minute round on a question reported in Apple interviews, run by an AI interviewer that asks one thing at a time, probes what you say, looks at your whiteboard, and weighs what that round is reported to weigh. It ends with a debrief: a score, what was strong, what was missing.

your question

Design Google Maps

Map tiles, place search, turn-by-turn routing with live traffic, and ETAs for a billion users.

You will not see the requirements, the numbers or the design before you start. That is the point.

Walk through it first

What the Apple round is reported to look like

45–60 minutes, but each hiring team runs its own loop, so the prompt usually follows the work of that team: a cloud service, a client feature or an on-device system.

What it weighs

Privacy and security: encryption, and what data each component can see
Where each component runs, on the device or in the cloud, and why
On teams that ship to devices: battery, memory and storage limits
Reliability and sync across devices, including offline behaviour

The common mistake

Treating privacy as a closing section. It is reported to shape the design itself: what stays on the device, what is encrypted and what the server can see.

From public interview guides and candidate reports, and Apple’s own interview guidance where it publishes any. Not endorsed by Apple. The interviewer is an AI running in that style; it is practice, not a prediction.

Start the round

Timed · 45 minutesInterview conditions. The AI interviewer owns the clock; the AI Mentor is off.With the AI Mentor · untimedNo clock, and an AI Mentor beside you to ask when you are stuck.

The interviewer’s opening question is free. Answering it is part of Pro. See an example round and its debrief →

The 8 questions this round draws from

Each is reported in Apple interviews. Pick one to sit, or read its reference design and walk through a strong answer first.

Design Google MapsMap tiles, place search, turn-by-turn routing with live traffic, and ETAs for a billion users.
drawn
Design a Web CrawlerFetch billions of pages a month politely, discover new links, skip duplicates, and keep the copy fresh without getting the crawler banned.
Design NetflixStream a fixed catalog to 40 M people at once, 200 Tbps at peak, starting in under two seconds, from cache servers placed inside the viewers’ own internet providers.
Design Google SearchSearch 50 billion pages at 100 k queries a second: the ten best results with snippets in under 200 ms, and news within minutes.
Design SpotifyStream 100 M tracks to 600 M listeners with sound in 200 ms, offline downloads, regional licensing, and every play counted for royalties.
Design GmailReceive, filter, store and search email for 1.5 billion users: 200 billion inbound messages a day, mostly spam, kept for 20 years.
Design StravaRecord runs and rides offline, process each upload into a map, stats and segment efforts, and rank them for 100 M athletes.
Design Google NewsCollect 2 M articles a day from 50,000 publishers, group them into stories, rank them per edition, and serve 300 M daily readers.

Other companies: Anthropic · Google · Meta · Amazon · OpenAI · Microsoft · Uber · DoorDash