I need to store data for a native mobile app I'm writing and I was wondering: 'why do I need to bother with DB setup when I can just read/write a JSON file?. All the interactions are basic and could most likely be parsed as JSON objects rather than queried.
DB are intent to work with standardized data or large data sets. If you know that there is only a few properties to read and it's not changing, JSON may be easier, but if you have a list of items, a DB can optimize the queries with index or ensure consistency through multiple tables