I know that it's the go-to solution for small, simple storage, but why on earth do mobile platforms have schema-driven data stores by default? There are a few

I know that it's the go-to solution for small, simple storage, but why on earth do mobile platforms have schema-driven data stores by default? There are a few other easy ways to store data[1] on Android. For example, you could use SharedPreferences for lightweight data. You could write anything that implements the Serializable interface to a file on internal or external storage. I don't know much about Redis, but if all you want to do is persist a key-value store, create a HashMap in your app and write to and read from disk. You can do something similar with an NSDictionary or NSArray in iOS. [2] [1] http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.html http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.... [2] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSDictionary_Class/Reference/Reference.html http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/... (see initWithContentsOfFile: and writeToFile:atomically:)