The one huge caveat for anyone that cannot use dynamic linking e.g. in an AppStore context, DuckDB isn’t a great choice. It’s very hard to statically link extensions.

This is where Arrow wins I think. Arrow CPP for example has very portable builds and the C interface is very usable for building bindings.

DuckDB is excellent, but it’s more a black box than a library.

Edit: after a conversation with a robot, it would seem that the DuckDB and ArrowCPP C APIs are complimentary, so it's very possible to have Arrow CPP and DuckDB to coexist in an app, each with its own strength. Arrow CPP doen't have a simple SQL story for example.