Facebook’s decision to shutter Parse definitely comes as a massive surprise – not in the least to the developers who have came to rely on it over the last few years. That kind of drastic change will certainly leave them with a sour taste in the mouth, making it more hard for Facebook to attract developers to latch onto new platforms it plans to create in the future.
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Facebook is shutting down Parse, its tool for helping developers build mobile apps, as it steps away from the intensely competitive cloud computing space to focus its attention elsewhere. The social networking juggernaut said that it will discontinue the service completely on January 28, 2017.
This announcement gave rise to many complaints from developers, yet Facebook is trying to make the transition easy and several alternatives are available.
The social network did not immediately respond to PCMag’s request for comment. Facebook acquired it in 2013 and it continued to grow both in terms of user base and functionality allowing devs to add a powerful scalable backend to their apps to take care of care of push notifications, connectivity and data storage. Even so, Parse now promises to make the transition process for engineers as smooth as possible.
The open source nature of these tools will allow users to continue operating things similarly to how they do now, but with Parse actively developing the codebase, a new solution may eventually be needed down the line. When it was bought by Facebook, the platform specialized on mobile developers.
“We’re proud that we’ve been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps, but we need to focus our resources elsewhere”, wrote Parse co-founder and head Kevin Lacker.
A migration guide is available here.
Expedia, the well-known travel website and popular productivity app, Quip, are among Parse’ clients according to The New York Times.
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But Parse’s CEO and co-founder, Ilya Sukhar, left Facebook in 2015, and the company has been quiet about the platform for a while.
