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Facebook to Shut Down Parse→

Mike Isaac and Quentin Hardy, reporting for The New York Times:

Facebook acquired Parse, a toolkit and support system for mobile developers, in 2013. At the time, the social network’s ambitions were high: Parse would be Facebook’s way into one day harnessing developers to become a true cloud business, competing alongside the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Those ambitions, it seems, have fallen back to earth. On Thursday, Facebook said it plans to shut down Parse, the services platform for which it paid upwards of a reported $85 million.

And from the announcement on the Parse blog:

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 migrate applications to other services.

Parse provided a series of online backend tools for app developers, and this will certainly be a hassle for those who implemented Parse services in their iOS apps. Not to mention apps that were built on top of Parse and then abandoned – while those apps may still be working on modern versions of iOS thanks to backwards API compatibility, they will stop working once Parse – the online component – shuts down for good.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of some reactions from the developer community to the Parse announcement. See also: Connected #13 from November 2014 on App Store preservation.