Question

We are now developing a social news feed iOS app, and we need to store a lot of news feed items (image,text) and chat history items (audio or text message) for offline use. Since CouchDB is a document database my questions are:

1. Are there any iOS apps (in Apple store) using this database (CouchDB
   mobile)?
2. Is CouchDB mobile stable enough to use?
3. How about its performance in iOS?

Answer 1

I have never been a fan of the idea that you’d have a full piece of database software running on your mobile device. Maybe in a few years when there’s more capacity.

Instead I’ve been a much bigger fan of using the browser’s pre-existing storage containers. PouchDB is a great example of how that could work, but is still in development. Depending on the sensitivity and amount of data you have, you could also store data in localStorage.

At the end of the day it’s really a question of whether you requiring full queryability locally on the device. Ie., do you really need to have indexes being built on the phone? Or can you instead work to get your database as close to the device as possible, using pre-existing HTTP caching methods to cut down on bandwidth use and latency.

To your other questions, I have no idea how it performs on iOS and I’m not sure whether anyone is using it in production. I do know that many companies have considered it, much like yourself. 🙂

Cheers.