Mobile applications draw the attention of hackers more and more each day because they have something that the attackers want: user data. Hard-coded secret keys, personal information stored in plain text on SD cards, usernames and passwords found unencrypted in databases, analytics collected and sent in the clear to remote servers, are just a few cases.

Augmented Reality (AR) is about overlaying pieces of a virtual world over the real world (in contrast to Virtual Reality (VR) that is about replacing the real world with a virtual one). On mobile devices, this simply means enhancing what you can see through the device’s camera with multimedia content (e.g. you can point your camera at a movie poster and watch its trailer, or you can point it at a star in the sky and learn its name). So, basically AR comes down to the following three fundamental questions: where to display what and how.

If you want to target multiple mobile platforms without having to maintain a separate code base for each one of them, mobile hybrid apps is one way to go. What mobile hybrid apps won’t do, though, is relieve you of the need to manage and use multiple tools, e.g. building your app for a specific mobile platform requires installing the platform’s native SDK on your machine.

Embeddable databases try to find their place in a world where mobile applications are smarter, and can take over more tasks in order to become either more independent, in a stand-alone scenario, or more active, in a distributed one. Apart from the five embeddable databases presented here, there are several more. SQL, document-oriented, key-value, object-oriented, graph… Choose the one that best suits the structure of your data (or the lack of it) and the needs of your application and use it.