Facebook never wanted to host your app: The real reasons it shut down Parse

Many years ago, My first android applications were using the Parse Cloud Platform. These applications used in 14 countries for B2B data collection without any interruption. I wanted to share a review of Parse’s shut down the story.

Fast Company named Parse one of the top 50 most innovative companies of 2013.

In 2013, Parse powered over 60,000 apps and had about the same number of developers. Its strategy was to go for broad developer adoption with a pretty broad feature offering. The corollary of that strategy is that the depth and quality of individual features and services were rather shallow. Large mobile app devs such as mobile gaming companies mostly shunned its service, building in-house custom solutions instead. Small- to medium-sized developers embraced its service but had a much smaller propensity to spend. Parse’s pricing was often perceived as notoriously cheap, making it unclear how they could ever make a profit off the service they provided. Faced with only low-margin volume business, potential divestiture proceeds were immaterial for a company the size of Facebook. So why even bother?

When Facebook acquired Parse back in April 2013, many people thought it meant Facebook was going all-in to become a developer platform. If you recall, Facebook was at a crossroads back then, with a share price below IPO level, desktop traffic plateauing, and mobile revenues a big question mark.

Parse was an early market leader in the mBaaS segment (mobile Backend-as-a-Service) in 2013. If Facebook really wanted to become a developer platform, you could have expected it to double down on the space, with lots of investment, more acquisitions, and integration of infrastructure. Instead, Parse changed very little, no other development platform acquisitions took place, and Parse never got integrated into the Facebook stack. All the while, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were aggressively doubling down on their respective developer platforms. And so Parse’s lead evaporated.

for the full story please visit Facebook never wanted to host your app: The real reasons it shut down Parse

Parse was a mobile backend as a service platform originally developed by the provider Parse, Inc. The company was acquired by Facebook in 2013 and shut down in January 2017.  Following the announcement in 2016 of the impending shutdown, the platform was subsequently open-sourced.

Since the hosted service was shut down, the Parse Platform has grown into an open-source community with its own blog, documentation, and community forum.

the Wikipedia page is Parse Platform

and so Parse’s new site is ParsePlatform.org