What’s happened?
This Thursday the entire developers’ community was shocked to find out that Facebook is shutting down Parse, their mobile backend as a service. “We have a difficult announcement to make. Beginning today we’re winding down the Parse service, and Parse will be fully retired after a year-long period ending on January 28, 2017,” Kevin Lacker, co-founder of Parse, said in a blog post.
What does it mean for developers?
It won’t be an overstatement to say that Parse has been a reliable backbone for programmers. Parse helped developers spend more time coding and less time on keeping up the back end, so it was indeed the sharpest tool in the shed for independent programmers and startups with online-enabled apps.
Sadly, starting today developers will have to migrate to other platforms or build their own Parse-compatible service, as provided by Parse. This is definitely bad news for those who invested their time and money in publishing BaaS apps. The good news is that developers are given a whole year to find a solution.
Why did Parse appear to be a real tidebringer causing a migration tsunami?
Back in 2014 when Urban Airship deprecated its developer program, Pushwoosh provided a warm welcome for all its ex-users. Developer Program was a starter tool for developers letting them build their first Push Notifications campaigns with a generous, but still limited number of pushes. Once it was closed, those developers came to our safe harbor looking for acceptable pricing and reliable service with all the respects given. That was the first significant migration tide, and the reason why we had to create the Migration Tool.
In November 2015 Zeropush team joined Twitter to work on new challenging projects and announced their push platform deprecation. In order to help developers reach out to their users through a simple, web-friendly API we provided a truly easy integration, required no painful integration and code changes. We even built a custom API adapter allowing Zeropush users to continue their Push Notifications campaigns as if they keep using Zeropush platform. That was the second migration tide, and truly seamless one.
A couple of years back, Parse concentrated a lot of efforts in the most important niche for us: push notifications. Now, when they are slowly but surely shutting down the service, the third tide will run all over the push ecosphere. Users, previously tied to Parse Backend, are now free to choose the way they going to set their sail. And we are offering them a win-win collaboration.
Reasons to choose Pushwoosh above all others
This year Pushwoosh is celebrating its 5th anniversary, and most of the heartbroken users are looking for something to safely rely on. The push notifications part is already covered by our Migration Tool, and takes mere minutes to import.
However, unlike many other services, we are not planning to stop there. Own plans for 2016 include, among other things:
- Parse API adaptation in order to help proxy existing services.
- Possibility to host your Parse Server on Pushwoosh premises (as a part of Enterprise package)
All in all, we guarantee a flawless migration based on the top of proven experience. No one will leave disappointed as it’s not our first time we help users move on when the time comes.
We welcome everyone aboard!
