Over the last few months I have been seeing a push toward using Sqlite in production, where appropriate. Some of this has been coming from 37 Signals with their "Once" products, which use Rails and a SqliteDB.

Sqlite can go pretty far if you have fast SSD disk. The biggest problem is that your app is constrained to a single host. For many apps, with backups and a failover plan, that may be OK. For other its a non starter.

I know SQLite is popular with no-backend native mobile apps BUT I read somewhere it's not safe: if a malicious app is granted the ability to read your phone files, it can access the data from the SQLite of other apps.

Can anyone confirm (or deny) this to me?

I think a lot of people use it for the wrong use case, and then people who don't fully understand many things propagate malinforation after misinterpreting the article and its findings/learnings.

It has a bad rep? Then Why do i see sqlite so often in different products?

In servers or clients (such as mobile apps?). The difference is huge

SQLite is excellent at on-dick storage, but why would you use it in lieu of PostgreSQL? It seems less scalable.

Cause it has to be accessed by disk protocols which are slow over the network is my guess. As you have to scale to more than one machine then you lose the convience of sqlite.

Doesn't postgres also access the disk in order to service queries which come over the network?

I meant that sqlite doesn't listen to the network. It's not a server the way mysql and postrgres etc are.

So if you want to access it from another machine you have to do so via a shared drive type setup.