Many developers have been upset after Facebook declared its decision to close down Parse service on January 28, 2016. The service has become the mainstay of many small developers, and shutting it down means they have to find a new way to continue their business.
Business Insider mentioned that there were 100,000 applications hosted by Parse at the time Facebook bought it. A comment in Facebook cynically said, "There goes my theory that Facebook's focus on developers and running services at scale would both improve Parse and make it stay around for a long time. Sigh. Yet another failed acquisition."
Parse's acquisition by Facebook was done in 2013 with a reported $85 million. Parse is a Y Combinator-backed startup, which gives key tools for designers to create and maintain slick applications for iPhone and Android. It was done by providing databases to monitor your data across phones and operating systems, as well as the mechanisms for applications to send push notifications.
Facebook was confronting a hard time in 2013 when it bought Parse, and was hoping to expand its business through a new great thing. And now since Facebook has gone through the difficulties and gained even greater success, it does not require that sort of expansion. Parse could be a setback of its present achievement. The time and energy spent to reach developers and have them login via Facebook with their applications was not an efficient action.
The Tech Crunch said that Parse shutdown is drastic for developers and may reduce their trust. Later on, when Facebook creates opportunities for developers, they might be doubtful to join a platform that they consider as not having a commitment in supporting them.
Kevin Lacker, Parse's co-founder, stated in a written announcement, "We understand that this won't be an easy transition, and we're working hard to make this process as easy as possible. We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrating applications to other services."
According to IT ProPortal, developers are still facilitated to arrange their movements. Parse provides developers with its database migration tools to relocate Parse app data to a MongoDB database. A full migration guide is also accessible, which shows how to utilize the open source Parse Server to run the majority of the Parse API from a custom Node.js server.
There are some other alternatives to Parse out there, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, which provide their own mobile application development services. However, the closing down of Parse by Facebook has trigerred anger among developers.
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