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Embedded database libraries provide developers with a com- mon and convenient data persistence layer. They have spread to many systems, including interactive devices like smart- phones, appearing in all major mobile systems. Their perfor- mance affects the response times and resource consumption of millions of phone apps and billions of phone users. It is thus critical that we better understand how they work, so they can be used more efficiently, and so developers can make faster libraries. Mobile databases differ significantly from server-class storage in terms of platform, usage, and measurement. Phones are multi-tenant, end-user devices that the database must share with other apps. Contrary to traditional database design goals, workloads on phones are single-app, bursty, and rarely saturate the CPU. We argue that mobile storage design should refocus on what matters on the mobile platform: latency and energy. As accurate per- formance measurement tools are necessary to evaluation of good database design, this uncovers another issue: Tradi- tional database benchmarking methods produce misleading results when applied to mobile devices, due to evaluating performance at saturation. Development of databases and measurements specifically designed for the mobile platform is necessary to optimize user experience of the most common database usage in the world.