What Facebook’s Acquisition of Parse Means for Mobile Developers

Facebook is truly following through with their mobile-first strategy, dishing out $1 billion to snap up social photo heavy weight Instagram as well as dozens of less publicized mobile start-ups over the past few years. Now Parse, the “mobile-backend-as-a-service startup” (mBaas) which develops tools and services for mobile developers has joined the Facebook family. According to TechCrunch, the deal was valued at around $85 million.

Parse offers services that help mobile developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins, handle push notifications and run custom code in the cloud. Over 60,000 mobile apps have integrated Parse into their software infrastructure. With Parse coming under the Facebook umbrella, the company now stands a good chance to scale rapidly. This may enable app developers to acquire new users by making apps more engaging and social to encourage new users to invite friends. Facebook may have just unlocked a new revenue stream by being able to offer back-end services such as data storage, push notifications, and a CMS for tracking app users.

As an iPhone app developer in San Diego this deal will likely add value to the mobile developer community. Parse is tremendously useful service that enables an iPhone app developer like myself to quickly put together certain portions of an app that may have required intensive custom coding in the past. We hope that Facebook allows Parse to operate with the same developer friendly business model that they started off with.