The initial magic of Parse was in the tight coupling of native mobile SDKs with standard cloud services. We released our first barebones beta SDKs long before we had a publicly documented (not to mention properly versioned and stable) server API. So for a while we iterated quickly underneath the hood and dragged people over to new versions of our cloud APIs with new SDK releases. It only became feasible to do this after we productized our server side APIs. And then it took some time to prioritize the project and execute on it.