// the find
guolindev/LitePal
An Android library that makes developers use SQLite database extremely easy.
LitePal is an Android ORM that maps Java/Kotlin classes to SQLite tables, handling schema creation and migration automatically. You define your models, list them in an XML config file, and it generates the DDL and handles upgrades when you bump a version number. It's aimed at Android developers who want to stop writing boilerplate SQLiteOpenHelper code.
The schema migration story is genuinely practical for small apps: add a field, increment the version, and it handles ALTER TABLE without you writing SQL. The fluent query API is clean and readable — `LitePal.where(...).order(...).find(Song.class)` is much less painful than raw Cursor juggling. Kotlin support is a real first-class addition, not just a Java wrapper — there are proper extension functions and reified generics. Multi-database support at runtime is a feature most ORMs skip entirely and is useful for apps that need isolated user data stores.
The last commit was August 2022 and the library has been effectively abandoned — if you hit a bug or a compatibility issue with a new Android API level, you're on your own. The async API was deprecated in 3.1.1 with no replacement provided; the README just tells you to 'handle async operations by yourself,' which is a cop-out. Schema migration has documented data-loss traps: adding a unique constraint, changing nullability, or certain column type changes silently drop all rows in that table. There's no support for coroutines or Flow, which means it's dead weight in any modern Kotlin-first codebase that already uses Room with LiveData or StateFlow.