Meet an Efficient Realm Browser for Android
With the growing number of people accessing the Internet via smartphones, mobile app development provides a unique opportunity for companies to reach a large number of potential customers.
The number of people using the internet on their mobile devices is increasing, while desktop internet usage continues to fall. According to App Annie, an app analytics firm, the daily screen time in 2019 averaged three hours (12 times more than a decade ago), but in 2020 it averaged four hours.
The gap between mobile app usage and mobile browser usage is also growing. According to eMarketer, adult smartphone users spent about 4 hours a day using mobile internet in 2020, and 88 percent of the time was spent in mobile apps rather than a browser. This emphasizes the importance of developing custom, responsive applications in addition to optimizing companies’ websites for mobile.
SCAND mobile development team has been building mobile apps for more than 20 years already. Apart from the popular platforms: Android, iOS, we had a chance to work with some rare systems like Bada and Tizen. Having significant experience and expertise in various developmental fields we are still craving for the best means to optimize, facilitate and make the development efficient for us and cost-effective for our customers.
Realm as One of the Most Prominent NoSQL Databases
Mobile app development is on the rise which means that more and more applications are being created specifically for mobile devices. Therefore, developers are in continuous search for tools that will provide maximum efficiency and quality. Also, it is preferable that the tool is ready for scalability and carrying out all operations immediately.
The excellence in what we do often comes with the latest and trendy tools, libraries, IDE, patterns, algorithms, programming languages, and approaches we use to develop mobile applications. We always try hard to meet our customers’ financial expectations. That’s why we carefully analyze and evaluate the nature of the data being stored: ways to manipulate it, its value, and only then we decide either to use relational DB, NoSQL DB, or the combination of them.
A database is one of the main problems developers face. Most modern apps will need some persistent data. App development entails increasing the complexity of the app and adding more functionality, it takes effort to create such complex apps, resulting in longer development cycles, overburdened resources, and a clumsy code base.
According to our expertise in mobile software development, some cases justify NoSQL DB’s cost-effectiveness and affordability in comparison to regular SQL databases. When selecting a NoSQL database for our projects, we decided to try Realm DB which stood out among others for several reasons:
- it’s easy integration;
- relatively high speed;
- its cross-platform character;
- reliable data protection;
- its noncommercial character, this database is free for use.
The Realm database is an object-based database that can simplify the work on a complex development project. It perfectly combines all features required for the convenient app development. It enables developers to gracefully handle the unpredictability of the mobile app environment, in which devices can shut down at any moment, connections can be lost, and so on. It facilitates communication between mobile clients, backend APIs, and databases.
Local Storage: Realm Database runs on the client devices. Since it accesses objects using the native query language for each platform, storing, accessing, and updating the data is easy and convenient.
Network Reliability: The Realm database is designed to be accessed offline first. It means that developers should read and write to the local database rather than the network. If Realm Sync is enabled, the Realm Database synchronizes data with MongoDB Realm over the network in a background thread. This sync protocol resolves conflicts consistently on each client and in the linked MongoDB Atlas cluster.
Reactive UI: Live objects always reflect the latest data stored in Realm Database and allow you to subscribe to updates, so your UI is always up to date.
However, despite the many benefits it provides, with time it became clear that despite this database is highly appreciated throughout the mobile development community there is still something to improve. That is why we developed a Realm browser for Android to debug and test the application logic or the UI.
The Idea of Android Realm Browser Development
Our team enjoys working with Realm. However, we found that it is rather inconvenient that the Realm browser is available only for Mac OS X users. Therefore, we decided to fix that problem. Our team created Realm Browser Library. It is a small, but very helpful library designed for viewing and editing Realm database files on Android devices faster and easier. Using Realm Browser Library developers have access to stored data directly in the program without having to copy the data file. Library also provides the ability to generate data automatically.
Our browser could be operated on the Realm database in two ways:
- Create a notification.
- Call the appropriate method at the right time.
The first method prevents interference in your app’s user interface, while the second one provides the necessary flexibility.
Recently, we launched a new version of Realm Browser for Аndroid with fixes and improvements. It comes with a more attractive UI for better user experience. You are welcome on the product page where you will find the details and links to download the library. We will be really happy to receive feedback and ideas from you. Feel free to share by writing to us.
