Facebook announces its decision to close down PARSE

Starting from January 28th, 2016, the MBaaS (Mobile Backend as a Service) platform PARSE will be available only for another year (until January 28th, 2017) to allow developers to migrate their apps to other services (READ THE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT...).

Omnys designs and develops mobile apps since 1999 and is today highly qualified to provide support and the best solutions to all companies that run apps integrated with PARSE and need to migrate from this platform.

PARSE, acquired by Facebook on 2013 for 85 MLN dollars, supported thousands of mobile developers as an essential supplier of back-end services as cloud storage, hosting (remote database), API (application programming interface), social networking services integration activities, user management, push notifications, etc.

Especially for mobile applications, PARSE allowed to add a very powerful and scalable backend, capable of giving important tools that implicate long and expensive development activities as:

• Various platform support: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Web Application;
• Full user management: registration, authentication, permissions, archives, personal profiles, etc;
• Services to send and receive emails and push notifications;
• Login via social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.);
• Remote NoSQL database (based on key/value concept typical for hashmap or json);
• Backend aggregated data services as data analysis, AD models, backup, etc.;
• Automatic synchronization between app and backend.

The winding down announcement caught off guard many companies that were using this platform to develop their apps; everyone thought that the acquisition by Facebook would have improved investments and, consequently, enforced platform services.

This announcement, instead, implies the necessity to develop and make all the necessary changes to applications integrated with Parse, as they will stop working or will have important limitations to their services if not migrated.