Facebook’s Parse developer platform is shutting down today

One year ago Facebook made the surprising announcement that it was shuttering Parse, the development platform that it purchased in 2013.

While the company said they would keep the service online for a year so developers could migrate their apps to a new backend, that time has finally come.

In what is probably the last ever post on the Parse blog, the service reminded users that today (January 30th, 2017) they would be disabling the Parse API on an app-by-app basis.

Parse was best known for its “backend as a service” product, and provided SDKs and APIs to let developers quickly get apps up and running without the effort of building a backend from scratch. At one point there were 600,000 apps that relied on the platform.

While Parse wasn’t the most popular tool amongst experienced developers (who had the resources to build their own custom backends), it was an invaluable tool for smaller developers.

I first came across the service in high school when I was just dipping my toes into iOS development. The low cost (free for most small users) combined with relative ease of use and detailed documentation made it an invaluable tool for me and many other young developers.

That’s why the community was so shocked when Facebook decided to shut it down — supporting Parse seemed like a small price to pay to appease an entire developer community, many of whom Facebook relies on to build apps for Facebook.

Parse did publish a big migration guide, as well as open source their server backend, both of which are legitimate alternatives for developers needing a Parse replacement.

Bye Parse, we hardly knew ya.