14 DAY TRIAL // In one of the most surprising decisions we've seen this year, Facebook has bluntly announced it will be shutting down Parse, its mobile development platform that it acquired in 2013.
Facebook has said the service will continue to operate normally all year, but on January 28, 2017, the company will put Parse in a chokehold and turn out the lights as it leaves.
Parse is a platform that made developing the backend part of mobile apps much easier through a series of ready-made APIs and services. While initially it dealt only with iOS and Android apps, the service expanded, even including IoT devices this past fall.
While not insanely popular, the service was popular nevertheless, which makes this entire announcement extremely strange.
Some clues were included in Facebook's announcement: "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." Or in other words, "Parse didn't make enough money, so we're moving on."
Migration tools are already available
To smooth out the transition to another infrastructure, Facebook has already released a database migration toolkit that will allow developers to move all their data to a MongoDB database.
Additionally, Facebook has also released a project called Parse Server, which will be able to run all the Parse APIs on the developers' own Node.js server.
Theoretically, Facebook's Parse team says that this should result in no prolonged downtime as the developers move their apps' backend from its infrastructure to their own. A migration guide has also been made available.
The Internet's reaction, at least from the developers that knew of Parse's existence, was one for the ages, similar in rants and snarkiness to when Google decided to shut down its RSS reader, when Twitter announced version 1.1 of its API, or when Facebook shut down its older Web games platform.
