alt Hacker News> You can package a Postgres database with your app just like SQLite
You technically can. But that is much more difficult to do than including sqlite, and isn't how postgresql was meant to be used. And what happens when you want to upgrade the major version of postgresql? Do you now include two versions of postgresql so that you can convert old databases to the new postgresql format? I certainly wouldn't say it is "just like SQLite".
I can believe the packaging step is more difficult on some platforms, but that’s a one time cost per platform.
Upgrades are more complex because Postgres (for some reason) doesn’t endure backwards compatibility with its disk format like sqlite across major versions (minor versions work fine though). For major version upgrades you ship both binaries and use pg_upgrade or pg_dump/pg_restore. It’s annoying, but it’s a one time cost to automate. It’s not like battling concurrency bugs in sqlite.