Local DB always sync to remote server sounds a great idea, because you get the responsiveness for using local DB, but also get sync crossing devices.
But can anybody talk about their experiences with couchbase on Android?
https://github.com/couchbase/Android-Couchbase/
What are other options out there? Cloudant?
Look at Touch-DB Android. It’s more compact than Android-Couchbase and is still regularly updated and maintained (I believe the main contributor is working on a big release, which is why the last update we two months ago). The framework is built on top of Ektorp and emulates a CouchDB database on your Android device.
Replication to and from a remote database is fairly intuitive and easy to set-up.
I use CloudAnt as my remote back end for my Android game.