Dr. Hipp said he started really following it when Android came out and included SQLite and suddenly there were 200M mobile SQLite users finding edge cases: https://youtu.be/Jib2AmRb_rk?t=3413
Lightly edited transcript here:
> It made a huge difference. That that was when Android was just kicking off. In fact Android might not have been publicly announced, but we had been called in to help with getting Android going with SQLite. [Actually], they had been publicly announced and there were a bunch of Android phones out and we were getting flooded with problems coming in from Android.
> I mean it worked great in the lab it worked great in all the testing and then [...] you give it to 200 million people and let them start clicking on their phone all day and suddenly bugs come up. And this is a big problem for us.
> So I started doing following this DO-178b process and it took a good solid year to get us there. Good solid year of 12 hour days, six days a week, I mean we really really pushed but we got it there. And you know, once we got SQLite to the point where it was at that DO-178b level, standard, we still get bugs but you know they're very manageable. They're infrequent and they don't affect nearly as many people.
> So it's been a huge huge thing. If you're writing an application deal ones, you know a website, a DO-178b/a is way overkill, okay? It's just because it's very expensive and very time-consuming, but if you're running an infrastructure thing like SQL, it's the only way to do it.
[0]: https://youtu.be/Jib2AmRb_rk?t=677 "SQLite: The Database at the Edge of the Network with Dr. Richard Hipp"