Mobile databases: SQLite and SQLite alternatives for Android and iOS

UPDATED 2022. At Droidcon Berlin, we noticed a lot of questions around databases. Many people weren’t aware of SQLite alternatives and Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs). Therefore, we follow up with an overview of the mobile database landscape.

What is a mobile database?

While Wikipedia defines a mobile database as “either a stationary database that can be connected to by a mobile computing device […] over a mobile network, or a database which is actually stored by the mobile device,” we solely refer to databases that run on the mobile device itself.

Why use a mobile database?

There are some advantages associated with using a mobile database:

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ObjectBox – The new Mobile Database (Beta)

ObjectBox is a new mobile object database optimized for performance. With ObjectBox, we are bringing technology from NoSQL server databases to mobile. We are impressed by the resulting performance advantage and invite you to try it for yourself. Go make your apps run faster!
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SQLite access with an ORM – FAQ

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SQLite, ORMs, NoSQL: what Android developers use and why

At yesterday’s Droidcon Berlin barcamp, we compared different database approaches (SQLite, ORMs, NoSQL). In our interactive session we asked about 80 developers how they use databases on Android and what advantages and disadvantages they see in each approach. Here are the gathered results:

Plain SQLite

~40% of the participants have used SQLite without additional tools.
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Tag Archives: NoSQL