As someone in a similar situation: I don't like tie ins with huge companies. My experience with the Facebook API has been horrible in the past (constantly changing, poor documentation).

In short, I don't want FB/Goog/Apple/etc. to keep buying up the independent operators that I know and love. In a similar way, I prefer to frequent my local coffee shack over a Starbucks. Nothing Starbucks could do would really change my mind.

There's not really anything facebook could do other than not being facebook. Sorry.

I think he is worried, thinking facebook may kill Parse, and he will have no support.

First off, Parse is awesome and I love it!

I have the same concerns (although I already have apps using Parse in the wild!): • Will FB kill off Parse? Seems quite unlikely in the short term, but in the long term? • Are they going to try and force any integrations with FB? • Will Parse continue to improve (they've done a lot of this recently!) or will it dwindle as others move faster? • Data / Privacy - what's going to happen with those going forward? These always are a concern in people's minds when FB comes up. • Facebook's APIs / Developer Support is SHIT... will this happen to Parse too?

I am in a similar position. Was about a week away from pulling the trigger on parse after a lot of research into the backend service providers. Now I will definitely look elsewhere. One problem is that FB APIs have a tendency to be constantly changing, and the documentation is not good. This shifting sands is not a good place to build a service.

However, the biggest reason is that FB is NOT a back end service provider. Facebook's customer is the advertisers. Before getting bought, Parse's customer were the companies that used their service. Now Parse is part of FB so future directions will all be in service of FB's main customer, the advertisers. I have no problem with this from a business standpoint, I am sure it is a good move for FB, but as a customer of back end cloud services I want to be purchasing that service from a company that puts me first. FB will not do that.

TL;DR: I was Parse's customer, I am not Facebook's customer.

My issues:

- I don't trust Facebook to not convert the user system into a Facebook connect monster and force it on me - I don't trust Facebook to not data mine my data and violate me and my user's privacy - I don't trust Facebook to let me export my data once I want to move on - I don't trust Facebook to actually delete data once I tell them to do so - I don't trust Facebook to not to attempt to monetize my users beyond the account fee that I pay

What would worry me is that I don't understand what Facebook really wants out of this acquisition, and why this will motivate it to do right by Parse users. It looks to me like a number of other people in this thread don't understand either and are coming up with their own theories, few of which are good news for the developer.

So the Parse platform allowed me to get and implement my iOS app in under a month, getting my MVP out there. If you want to really assure users that they can be comfortable, and to not flee, make it so we have access to our user's password hashes.

Before, the Parse team said they were thinking of implementing it, but now there's no contest. Either you guys allow me to take my user data, or we're done, and I'm completely separating from you guys, and wouldn't recommend anyone building on the platform.

So, let me have ALL access to my user's data, and we can keep hanging. Otherwise, we're done.

As it is, I'm making plans already to move, on the assumption you guys won't let me get my user's data.

Parse is a distraction for FB. You are not even in the same business. Regardless of what you say, you are unable to override the CEO if or when he decides that Parse is to be shut down. The alternatives are more appealing because their business model solely depends on customers paying for the back end service.

The best thing FB can do is to bind itself legally to continue to run Parse for the next x number of years.

If FB wants to dabble with PaaS, businesses are going to assess Parse on the basis that it is only an experiment. Tying oneself to a back end is like marriage. No one will invest in a relationship if the other side is only half serious.

Our team uses Pieceable, which Facebook also purchased, and which I would also consider a tool for third party mobile developers.

The acquisition announcement [1] states that Pieceable is/was going to be killed 12/31/12, but prior to that date they'd open source it. And, as far as I can tell, that's the last time anything has been said about the product. I don't even know if you're still taking our money, but it's going to suck when you turn it off or it breaks due to obsolescence.

So, my answer is that your prior behavior does not instill confidence.

[1] https://www.pieceable.com/facebook

I'm in the same boat - was planning on using Parse and no longer think I will. Core issue: complete lack of trust that Facebook won't screw things up as they have so many times in the past (frequent breaking changes to their API, etc.).

Also, complete lack of trust in Facebook due to their lack of understanding of the need for privacy as opposed to pseudo-social ... "stuff".

> gift third party developers with APIs...

Phrasing like this concerns me. When making platform decisions, I would very much like greater assurance that there is an expectation of how a relationship matures than you would find in a "gifting" scenario. I feel like sometimes the attitude from Facebook has been "We're giving all of this stuff away for free! What is there to complain about?" Free means no expectation of warranty and zero assumed reliability.

I don't really even care about free. If you're running a real startup, you pay for things, and I would gladly pay for Facebook API usage if it meant that Facebook took their APIs a little more seriously (I could talk at great length about all the subtleties in Facebook's APIs that require us to duplicate insane amounts of work that Facebook could _easily_ take care of). Amazon is clearly the best at this with AWS (especially in preemptively coming up with new services it turns out everyone was building piecemeal anyway), I would look at Amazon's APIs and try to port the some good insights to the Graph API.

I've been using Parse with great pleasure as well for a couple of months and I really want to keep using it because their API is really beautiful and their design is absolutely gorgeous. But the past event that worries me is the acquisition of face.com. Right after the acquisition, they assured everyone it would stay up and they would continue to support it for all the developers who integrated its facial recognition API into their apps. And just a couple of months later, they announced they would fully absorb and kill it as an independent service. Today, the domain doesn't even lead anywhere. Now I know that the scope and impact of Face.com were way less than those of Parse, but still, you can't blame us for worrying.

One thing that would personally reassure me would be for Facebook to add a "non-hosted" offering to Parse, which means the ability to download Parse's application and install it on my own server. If this was available I would keep using Parse as a hosted service knowing that in the event that Facebook decides to shut it down at some point, I can export all my data and have it running on my own infrastructure.

Users of apps based on Parse used to just be users, now they're Facebook users. Combine the fact that a core part of Parse is storing user data, and Facebook's track record of treating such data, I think you should be able to figure the rest out yourself.

If I'm going to pay a firm to store data for me, I need to completely trust that that firm is going to treat said data with silk gloves. I choose what's done with it, not my backend storage partner.

I'm going to be very surprised if the Facebook make-a-detailed-profile-of-every-person-on-the-planet department is going to keep their hands off of Parse data for the next 3 years.

(iOS only)

Looks sweet, thanks for the recommendation. Whenever I get a box I'll look into using this for Push services.

No offense, but suggesting Microsoft to a guy who is turned off by Facebook made me chuckle

We had been getting lots of requests for a migration tool prior to the announcement.

http://www.firebase.com and https://www.backlift.com/index.html

That chart is quite entertaining. Too complex to be accurate but very informative.

This ones pretty cool, but documentation doesn’t really catchup with that others. but do check it out..

iKnode doesn't lock you in at all. ;)