SQLite in Production: When the Simplest Database Is the Right One

For years the advice was automatic: SQLite is for prototypes, mobile apps, and test suites. If you're building anything "real," you need PostgreSQL. That advice was reasonable in 2015. It's increasingly wrong in 2026. SQLite powers every iPhone, every Android device, every Firefox and Chrome installation. The engine processes more queries per day than every other database engine combined. What changed isn't SQLite's reliability — it's the ecosystem around it. What Actually Changed Litestream solved SQLite's most critical production gap. Ben Johnson's tool continuously replicates SQLite databases to S3-compatible storage by streaming WAL changes in near-real-time. Recovery point objectives drop to seconds. There's no cron job, no pg_dump window, no backup interval to worry about — just a single sidecar binary and a bucket policy. LiteFS from Fly.io uses a FUSE-based filesystem to replicate SQLite across multiple nodes. A primary handles writes; replicas in Tokyo, London, or São Paulo se