[xisthesqrtof9]

I don’t know if things have changed but when I started developing apps about 3 years ago, none of the docs or tutorials mentioned persistent storage until the very end, and it would touch on it very lightly.

So when you have developers learning about app dev assuming they will have an internet connection, and most of the time really fast since it’s their dev machine the apps are being built on. Caching sort of becomes and after thought and doesn’t get much attention.

Also, I do recall the api for doing this sort of stuff was very SQL like, at least in the iphone. This probably adds another layer to most devs knowing frontend only and being exposed to CRUD apis.

[muzani]

There's a bit of a joke about mobile dev interviews these days. A company with no experience in mobile dev will ask you if you've ever integrated analytics. A company with a mobile dev team will ask you to write a movie app with pagination and caching. An experienced company will ask about declarative UI and reactive programming.

"the api for doing this sort of stuff was very SQL like"

Android these days do it via Jetpack/Room. It's still SQLish, but much less room (heh) for typos and similar bugs, and it even does syntax highlighting for common mistakes.

[lozenge]

If you use Firebase the syncing and offline access comes for free.

I suspect most of the first mobile developers used to be web developers and then they taught the future generations of mobile developers to also be like web developers. Query endpoints from the backend for individual features without building a local view in the javascript of the whole world. And slap some spinners and error messages on to give the illusion of responsiveness.

As for the backend, they just use whatever database they prefer.