Mobile apps have become an omnipresent part of most people’s daily lives. They are used for everything from banking, gaming, traveling, and even parking.
Mobile app usage is increasing every year, meaning providers are harvesting more data from these apps. This has made choosing the right database an extremely important aspect of the app creation process, especially now that more apps are AI applications or have AI functions.
In 2024, Statista showed that AI chatbot apps experienced an increase in downloads over 112 percent year-over-year. To compete in the highly competitive app industry, developers must use a database that is flexible, scalable, and able to handle the different types of data. Document databases fit that criteria, and many app developers use them to create new apps.
What Are Document Databases
A document database is a NoSQL database that stores information in documents. Compared to traditional SQL databases that store data in fixed rows and columns, document databases use flexible documents that can store both structured and unstructured data. This is why document databases are considered general-purpose databases that can be used in various use cases and industries, such as app creation.
A guide to MongoDB’s document databases explains how a document is a record and typically stores information about one object and any of its related metadata in field-value pairs. The values can be a variety of types and structures, including strings, numbers, dates, arrays, or objects, and documents can be stored in formats like JSON, BSON, and XML. This makes document databases very adaptable for app development.
Why Are Document Databases Used in App Creation
Below are three reasons document databases are used for the creation of apps.
Flexible Schemas
Document databases can handle a wide range of data, including new data types because they don’t have a flexible schema.
This means that not all documents in a collection (a group of documents) need to be the same. Most apps have several components, such as user profiles, in-app activities, and social sharing, as well as videos, images, audio files, and text. The flexible schemas of document databases make them highly adaptable and able to implement any alterations, such as modifications and feature changes, seamlessly during the creation process and beyond.
Easy Data Modeling
One key advantage of document databases for app developers is how data models in document databases can map directly to objects in programming languages. An article titled ‘Empower Modern App Developers with Document Databases’ outlines how the documents have a universal data format, which means the documents map directly to data structures in popular programming languages, removing the need for the additional mapping layer often used with relational databases.
As a result, there is much less code to write as “developers don’t need to decompose data across tables or run joins” when creating applications, making the whole process much more developer-friendly and faster.
Scalability and Performance
A key consideration when creating an app is its ability to grow and evolve as more users download it. The goal of an app is to generate high user engagement and high traffic loads. With the most popular apps being downloaded tens of millions of times, app developers need to have a database built into the app that can handle these demands.
Document databases have the ability to scale horizontally, which means that they can naturally grow to handle high data volumes by adding nodes to the server. A document database’s ability to scale and handle large and changing data loads means that the app’s performance won’t be compromised during the development stage and when in the public realm. Users expect the app to work seamlessly, and app developers will factor this in when creating the app by using a document database as the preferred data management system.
Document databases are increasingly being used in app development because of their flexibility, scalability, and ease of use. Using a document database, developers are able to get apps out to the public much faster and ensure that the app can handle an increasing user base. Once the app is created, it then needs to be marketed to the correct target markets in order to find this large user base.
For information on how to do this, read our feature on App Marketing Costs in 2025, where you will learn the average cost range for marketing a mobile app, key factors that influence marketing costs, and strategies to effectively manage your app marketing budget.
