Parse Powers Up With Analytics, Cloud Jobs, Unity Support, Web Parity With Its Mobile Backend Service

Parse announced a new analytics tool, Background Jobs for running Javascript tasks, a big partnership with game development tool Unity, better ways to manage images and user sessions, and improved web support that brings it to parity with its mobile app offering at today’s Parse Developer Day conference. “Man I wish I had Parse back then”, said Mark Zuckerberg about launching Facebook back in 2004.

Parse is the mobile backend-as-a-service that Facebook acquired in April to bolster its platform services offering. It helps developers store their apps’ data in the cloud, handle identity logins, deliver push notifications, and roll out custom code from the cloud. Parse would become the first paid B2B service provided by Facebook.

When Facebook bought Parse it had 60,000 apps running on its platform. Despite a vocal minority griping that Facebook would peek at their work, Parse experienced a big growth spurt, with signups spiking 9.4X right after the acquisition. It hit 80,000 apps by May and 100,000 in June. In that time, Parse also launched web hosting so developers could run their web presence or landing page off the same system as their apps and share user data easily across them.

Zuckerberg kicked off the conference with a Facebook origin story. ”All I had was $8000 that my parents had saved for college. We needed to get something that could lug around severs, and a router. Someone came up with the idea to buy a used router on eBay and luckily it worked” Zuckerberg said. “We ended up managing all our own servers” but all the backend stuff distracted the team from innovating in social networking.

He hopes Parse will alleviate this friction for startups “so you can focus on building great experience.” Together, he says that at Parse and Facebook, “We’re trying to build tools to help you do two things: build and grow your apps.

Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar then came out and talked about how Parse has grown to handle “Billions of API requests, billions of push notifications, and hundreds of millions of devices that have talked to Parse.”

For Facebook, the idea is that if it can help developers with their backend, they might come to the social network for help integrating social into their app and gaining more users. In that way, Parse nestles in nicely beside Facebook’s SDKs for integrating social login and sharing, and its app install ads. Through Parse, Facebook could get more apps sharing content back to its News Feed that it can monetize with ads, and get developers paying for more ads.

Parse Powers Up With Analytics, Cloud Jobs, Unity Support, Web Parity With Its Mobile Backend Service