Deciding on your mobile app tech stack shouldn’t be a gamble. Couchbase Mobile delivers a proven, scalable, and mature solution built to last. As a leader in mobile databases, Couchbase ensures you’re ready for the growing demand of offline-first, AI-powered mobile and IoT apps. With Couchbase, you can trust your tech stack to stay stable and reliable.

The MongoDB sync news 

MongoDB has announced the deprecation of its mobile capabilities, namely, Atlas Edge Server, Atlas Device Sync, and Atlas Device SDKs (formerly Realm). This deprecation raises significant concerns for developers relying on MongoDB’s mobile tools, as it forces them to seek new solutions and rework existing projects, disrupting long-term development plans.

While they state that Realm will remain an open source offering going forward, contributions and support for the project from MongoDB will inevitably wane as they sunset the technology from their commercial portfolio.

We can guess there are many reasons for this product deprecation, but we are certain of some related factors:

    • MongoDB Atlas acquired Realm in 2019, and has struggled ever since to unify the two disparate technology stacks to offer a scalable enterprise grade solution.
    • The solution had many issues that made it a challenge for customers to use for offline-first use cases.
    • MongoDB has now failed twice to play in the mobile space, first with Realm, then with the Realm reboot as Atlas Device SDK. We don’t think they will try again with a native solution anytime soon.

With this latest development, MongoDB is effectively washing their hands of mobile capabilities and forcing customers to move to alternative, third party, technologies for their mobile apps, and at the same time asking them to integrate those alternatives with MongoDB Atlas as the backend cloud database.

The news is receiving a frosty reception from MongoDB customers using those features, to say the least, as evidenced in developer posts on their forum.

In the rush to alternatives, some developers may consider SQLite, the open source embedded database. However, they will quickly find that SQLite is built for standalone apps, has no built in data sync, and is not document oriented so it is less flexible for development and struggles to scale. As such it’s not a viable solution for offline-first, enterprise class, mobile and IoT app deployments.

We’re here to suggest that, if you have to move mobile apps off of MongoDB anyway, why go the path of a complicated integration? You should move to a complete end-to-end database platform with a proven track record and over 10 years of mobile support excellence: Couchbase Mobile.

Couchbase Mobile: 10 years of mobile excellence

Launched in 2014, Couchbase Mobile is a mature, end-to-end mobile database platform used to power high-scale, mission-critical mobile apps like those at Emirates, PepsiCo, Tommy Hilfiger, PG&E and countless more. We’ve been successful in mobile for over a decade, providing developers with options for large enterprise, or free community edition deployments, and will continue to expand the Couchbase Mobile offering and capabilities in line with the evolving features in our customers applications (most recently coming to market with vector search features that run on-device, enabling offline-first AI-powered apps at the edge that have no dependencies on the internet).

Couchbase Mobile is a superior alternative to Atlas Device Sync because it provides a more complete cloud-to-edge solution for offline-first, mobile and IoT apps than MongoDB ever had, and certainly better than using loosely-integrated mashups of MongoDB and 3rd party solutions!

The Couchbase Mobile stack

Capella App ServicesWe simplify your architecture by specializing in powering offline-first applications at the edge with three foundational components:

A cloud-native database
Available as a fully managed and hosted Database as a Service with Couchbase Capella, or deploy and host Couchbase Server on your own.

An embedded database
Couchbase Lite is the embeddable version of Couchbase for mobile and IoT apps that stores data locally on the device. It’s lightweight, provides full CRUD and SQL++ support, as well as comprehensive platform support including Swift, Obj-C, Kotlin, .Net, Java and C, as well as community and partner maintained support for JavaScript.

While MongoDB Atlas Device SDKs do support Flutter, React Native and Node.js natively, they do not support C, which imposes a limitation on the platforms and devices they can support (probably another reason for the deprecation). With C support in Couchbase Mobile, Couchbase Lite can be embedded to nearly any platform or device, including resource constrained single-board computer IoT devices.

Data synchronization from the cloud to the edge
A secure, hierarchical gateway for data sync over the web, as well as peer-to-peer sync between devices, with support for authentication, authorization and fine-grained access control. Choose from fully hosted and managed data sync with Capella App Services, or install and manage Couchbase Sync Gateway yourself.

Check out this demo video of Couchbase Mobile data sync between devices and from cloud to edge: Couchbase Mobile – live data sync demo.

Vector search support for AI features

What’s more, Couchbase Mobile goes beyond the capabilities of MongoDB by offering vector search both in the cloud with Capella AND on-device in Couchbase Lite, enabling semantic search and RAG at the edge with no internet dependencies, making searches fast, secure and reliable.

Watch this explainer video on Couchbase Mobile vector search: Couchbase Mobile Vector Search from Cloud to Edge.

Couchbase Mobile: here for you today and in the future

At Couchbase we are committed to being a leader in mobile database applications, and will continue to grow and evolve our offering to meet the expanding demand for offline-first, AI-powered mobile and IoT apps. You shouldn’t have to worry about your tech stack being around for the duration, go with Couchbase Mobile and gain the peace of mind that comes with adopting a proven, scalable, mature technology!

Try it yourself, it’s free!

You can sign up to use the Free Tier of Couchbase Capella, which includes Capella App Services, the hosted data sync solution in Capella. See for yourself how easy it is to set up for mobile data sync!

You can even test data sync through Capella App Services using this sample mobile application called Simple Data Sync, simply install it on two devices to see peer-to-peer sync in action. And to sync from cloud to edge, follow the instructions in the app source code on GitHub to configure Capella App Services for syncing with the Simple Data Sync sample app.

Resources

Author

Posted by Mark Gamble, Director of Product & Solutions Marketing

I am a passionate product marketer with a technical and solution consulting background and 20+ years of experience in Enterprise and Open Source technology. I have launched several database and analytic solutions throughout my career, and have worked with customers across a wide variety of industries including Financial Services, Automotive, Hospitality, High-Tech and Healthcare. I have particular expertise in analytics and AI, love all things data, and am an emphatic supporter of data-for-good initiatives.

All Posts Website

Leave a reply