ObjectBox – The new Mobile Database (Beta)

ObjectBox is a new mobile object database optimized for performance. With ObjectBox, we are bringing technology from NoSQL server databases to mobile. We are impressed by the resulting performance advantage and invite you to try it for yourself. Go make your apps run faster!



Performance is the number one reason why we created ObjectBox. Previously, we created greenDAO, the fastest Object/Relational Mapper (ORM) for Android and SQLite. Since its first release in 2011, we gained a lot of insight into object persistence – and the performance limitations imposed by SQLite. We realized that in order to improve performance on mobile significantly, we needed to go to the core and build a database designed for objects.

ObjectBox top 5 features

Superfast: our motivation to build ObjectBox was to deliver the best possible performance. It outperforms all embedded databases we ever tested (which are quite a few), typically by a factor 5 to 15. Details will follow.

Object API: No more rows, columns and SQL – ObjectBox is a database built for objects from ground up (no ORM, no SQLite). The concise API is easy to learn and just takes a fraction of the code you would need to work with SQLite.

Instant unit testing: With our multi-platform approach, you can run plain unit tests on the desktop (no Robolectric, no instrumentation tests) with a real database in an instant.

Simple threading: Objects returned by ObjectBox work in all threads with no strings attached.

No manual schema migrations: ObjectBox takes care of new object versions with added, removed, and renamed entities and properties.

Learn more about all ObjectBox features and its documentation. Also, we have some very interesting features in the queue we want to present soon. So stay tuned! (Sign up for our newsletter below…)

Get ObjectBox Beta & Documentation

We think ObjectBox is close to a 1.0 release. ObjectBox already runs smoothly in live apps with more than 150,000 monthly active users. Still, we want to do another reality check by making a beta version available to a wider audience. As with any beta version, you may encounter bugs or rough edges. Please let us know; we are looking forward to your feedback.

ObjectBox is available as a Maven dependency. It’s best to look at the ObjectBoxExamples repository on GitHub to see how it is integrated and how you can use it in your app (Apache derivated beta license). Also the getting started documentation will help along with a couple of documentation pages. It will be improved and extended over the next few days, so let us know what you want to see. Also, we strongly believe in Open Source, so we will be gradually releasing source code to the ObjectBox GitHub repo.