13 ms·

This Startup Could Literally Change The Way The Entire App Industry Works

126 points by tikhon 14y ago

myearwood 14y ago
Parse is a great company, but there are other many alternatives that exist. Some of them might be a better fit for you . You can check them out at http://mobilebackendreviews.com http://mobilebackendreviews.com .
thedufer 14y ago
I have literally never seen a sensationalist headline like this come true. But seriously, Parse looks like it could help some people out, and seems to be doing so already, but let's not be ridiculous. When people say that it decreased dev time by 10-100 times, what they really mean is that they added features that otherwise would never have seen the light of day, and they have no idea how long it would have taken had they tried. There will always be things like this to help build apps, and they will always come with trade-offs. Things may be easier, but slight changes to those things become impossible. Not everyone will think that the trade-off is worth it, and the app industry will chug along as always, if a bit shinier.
- objclxt 14y ago
  I don't think that's true: I've used Parse on several commercial projects where the cost and effort involved in developing internal back-end solutions was significantly more than using Parse. And it wasn't a case of adding in features we weren't going to do: this was implemented core feature sets. Yes, there are trade-offs, and we still use internal systems and solutions for some of our projects where Parse isn't appropriate. However, I can categorically say it's saved us significant time and money - probably not a factor of ten, but large enough for us to continue looking to use it in the future.
  - thedufer 14y ago
    > not a factor of ten This is why I'm calling it sensationalist. Think about what it would mean for someone to claim 100x faster - if they got it done in a week (and that's pretty damn fast for any decent piece of software, regardless of the environment or scope), they're claiming that they initially budgeted nearly two years. I'm saying that there is no way that ever happened. Again, I said that there are benefits (and also trade-offs), but that this isn't game-changing. I'm not clear on where we disagree.
- aswanson 14y ago
  Yeah, I've taken that tack "the more sensational the title, the better I'm off reading the commentary to the submission to satisfy my curiosity rather than clicking through the link and rewarding a hypeman/bullshitter."
mvkel 14y ago
Literally.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  It was necessary lest you think they only meant that it would change the startup world figuratively. There's an important difference.
  - drivingmenuts 14y ago
    Is it OK to think that both of those words are overused?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ionforce 14y ago
This is literally a horrible headline.
billpatrianakos 14y ago
Hey, Tikhon, we know you're proud of Parse and you really should be because it's awesome but taking liberties with a headline like you did there might not be so cool. It can be taken one of two ways: 1. The founder of Parse is a total egomaniac. 2. The founder of Parse is really proud of his company and has a great sense of humor. Parse is awesome though. I signed up back when you guys were first opening it up to people and I remember you sent out a lot of emails to get people to come back and keep using it and you have great documentation and tutorials. I see it "changing the way the app industry works" in the same way AWS, Heroku, and others changed how people thought about web app deployment. The big deal is in giving more people access to the tools they need to run a mobile app that they either couldn't build or afford before. That's awesome because lots of people will build some cool things with Parse... And amateurs like me will be able to churn out crap much quicker and cheaper. Awesome!
- Sam_Odio 14y ago
  HN headlines are often changed by moderators to match the article's title. That might have happened here.
- jmharvey 14y ago
  How did he take liberties with the headline? "This Startup Could Literally Change The Way The Entire App Industry Works" is the actual headline from Business Insider.
  - lchang 14y ago
    The Business Insider can be a bit on the sensationalist side. I don't want to say tabloid but they're around TechCrunch levels of overexaggeration.
  - billpatrianakos 14y ago
    The link sent me to Yahoo Finance which had a headline that didn't include about 99% of the words in the headline here. Oh well, my mistake.
    - 14y ago
calciphus 14y ago
Will it change how the entire app industry works? Not really. Will it make life easier for some developers? Probably. Having used Parse in the past and ultimately dropped it for a custom backend, let's take a look at where Parse fits really well: 1) You're a one-off or small dev shop with no web experience, and making a basic data store with a JSON API as a backend is beyond your technical means (this is by far the best use). 2) Your data isn't that complex (stuff like high scores and the like), so the fact that this is just a big Key/Value store won't harm your performance much. 3) You also don't need any server-side intelligence, just a data store an an API. 4) Your growth and revenue model is in line with the pricing model of the service you selected. Now here's the things I struggle with, and why where I work when we develop mobile apps, we stay away from Parse/Stackmob/Kinvey/Appcelerator ACS/Whoever. These apply to our customers / projects, and may not be the same for you. 1) We almost always want our server to be intelligent, not just an API-wrapped database. When I want to trigger push notifications, I want to do it with server-side logic, not everything running in the app. Our big beefy AWS servers are way more capable than someone's 2-year-old free Smartphone. 2) It doesn't take long for monthly fees to outpace the cost of just having your own server, or eat into your profitability. Most of these services work out to about 3-5 cents per user per month. Depending on the size and complexity of the app, and what the revenue generated from it looks like, that can be vastly more expensive than a small AWS or Heroku deployment. 3) It's rare that we need a data store as simple as "users + key/value". It's one thing to build a basic chat app or worldwide high score in a system like that. It's another to try and build an inventory tool or CRM. 4) Mobile data connectivity is high-latency and unreliable. Making a dozen API calls to populate a single screen is not only inefficient, it can be very frustrating to your users. An API call for a screen/view/fragment should return exactly the data needed, no more, no less. Let the database do what databases do best: sort and collect data. Let the phone just display it. So really, for small apps or apps with relatively simple data requirements, Parse does a fine job, especially if you don't have server people on your team (in which case, BaaS is your only real option). If the app's data is going to be complex, require server-side logic or have any kind of complexity that would involve optimized API calls? You're probably better building your own.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
" Using Parse can lower your development time by 10x to 100x. Developers go from taking weeks to build an app to being able to build one and push it out in a matter of hours. " So here is an interesting question. If you can build an app in a matter of minutes, how much is it worth? I ask because there is often a strong correlation between economic value and the time it takes to produce something. For example, movies produced in a couple of days often have a lower economic return than movies that take months to produce. Even including pornography in that mix, sans outliers like Paris Hilton, there seems to be a strong relationship between time and value. Presumably Parse makes the implementation stage easier, but is that for all types of App? Or is it a class of App? It would need to be the former to 'change the industry' but what does that mean about the economic value of the industry to begin with? Clearly this is part of a much bigger question of the economic value of 'Apps' in general. We are evolving models based on various metrics of course, and I'm curious does this 'destroy' value or does it 'grow' the market, or something else entirely.
- tom_b 14y ago
  This is an important question for software development in general. I find it interesting to see just how much simple tasks (say parsing data and combining it with other data) results in significant improvements in user experience. I am not in the "everyone should learn to code" camp, but I sometimes think that everyone should know a few standard Unix command line tools. Maybe the link between effort and economic gain will balance back out sometime. Maybe right now is just one of those boom times in history and useful tool creators are in position to reap the benefits.
- astine 14y ago
  You're talking about the supply side of the supply/demand equation. Essentially, the greater the supply of something, the lower the price one can charge for it. Reducing the cost of production effectively increases the supply, so it ultimately reduces the price as well. Ultimately, what this means is that the competition will be harsher and that will drive the prices down. This won't drive down the value of the mobile market in general, just the prices of individual apps (though they are already fairly low.) In fact, generally when the supply goes up, the total income of the industry as a whole goes up as well because marginal consumers will now participate due to lower prices.
bbayer 14y ago
just an article of "One Ring to rule them all" phenomenon. Entire app industry contains lots of different usage scenarios. It is literally impossible for a platform/library to fit all type of requirements.
bsaul 14y ago
Anyone knows how Parse's server side is done ? By looking at their API i would say something like AWS + MongoDB, but they don't seem to have known the same kind of problems as Heroku when Amazon went down the other day. So maybe they're using else. Anyone ?
tluyben2 14y ago
How about lock-in? What's your (the users/owners) stance on that? It seems my app will be completely hanging on Parse.com; they can change the pricing, go bankrupt, get hacked, get bought, go down(AWS) or whatever scenario making me wish I didn't use them? This functionality seems a bit too crucial/low-level to be not in-house or open source.
- inlined 14y ago
  Parse lets you easily export all your data from their servers; they don't intend to lock you in. http://blog.parse.com/2012/03/09/one-click-export/ http://blog.parse.com/2012/03/09/one-click-export/
  - zmitri 14y ago
    Even your users? Do they give you password hashes? How does that work?
  - tluyben2 14y ago
    Yeah, but exporting is not really an option... When you are running, have massive traffic, 100+ million api requests/month etc, it's not very interesting that you can 'export all data'. I need the services otherwise I need to rebuild them right? I would consider this a massive risk for my business. Which happens with most PAAS/SAAS thing ofcourse, but this seems to be very fundamental to my apps; I mean; apps won't work without this service. I like the Ning proposition; if you want you just download the source + data and run on your own servers. Or there should be a buy-out for the software, maybe depending on the number of average monthly API requests you did until that time with some kind of minimum. For stuff this low-level I think a (restricted) open source model is the only way to go to prevent lock-in to be honest.
djbender 14y ago
LITERALLY
uwemaurer 14y ago
Currently the usage of the Parse SDK for Android is marginal: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/parse/parse http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/parse/parse
raheemm 14y ago
Is Parse a specialized hosting/API environment for mobile apps? Or is it more like a weebly for mobile apps?
benthumb 14y ago
As a sometime developer myself and late-blooming CS student I see things like this and start to feel insecure about my place in the world... if the barrier to entry keeps getting lower so that anybody can build an app, what's the point? Obviously, I need not feel this way. Why? b/c this trend where eventually 'civilians' w/ no training in info tech or knowledge of conventional programming languages will be in a position to build stuff on the fly implies that the state of the art of software engineering is going to be miles from where we are today, and to me this is a good thing: hardcore software engineers have always been focused on making tools.
teyc 14y ago
I was hoping to find something more substantial and was disappointed to read what is essentially a piece of PR fluff. One point got me curious though: what kind of apps are built in one day? Anyone in the app-space care to elaborate?

126 points by tikhon 14y ago

Parse is a great company, but there are other many alternatives that exist. Some of them might be a better fit for you . You can check them out at http://mobilebackendreviews.com http://mobilebackendreviews.com .

thedufer 14y ago

I have literally never seen a sensationalist headline like this come true. But seriously, Parse looks like it could help some people out, and seems to be doing so already, but let's not be ridiculous. When people say that it decreased dev time by 10-100 times, what they really mean is that they added features that otherwise would never have seen the light of day, and they have no idea how long it would have taken had they tried. There will always be things like this to help build apps, and they will always come with trade-offs. Things may be easier, but slight changes to those things become impossible. Not everyone will think that the trade-off is worth it, and the app industry will chug along as always, if a bit shinier.

objclxt 14y ago
I don't think that's true: I've used Parse on several commercial projects where the cost and effort involved in developing internal back-end solutions was significantly more than using Parse. And it wasn't a case of adding in features we weren't going to do: this was implemented core feature sets. Yes, there are trade-offs, and we still use internal systems and solutions for some of our projects where Parse isn't appropriate. However, I can categorically say it's saved us significant time and money - probably not a factor of ten, but large enough for us to continue looking to use it in the future.
- thedufer 14y ago
  > not a factor of ten This is why I'm calling it sensationalist. Think about what it would mean for someone to claim 100x faster - if they got it done in a week (and that's pretty damn fast for any decent piece of software, regardless of the environment or scope), they're claiming that they initially budgeted nearly two years. I'm saying that there is no way that ever happened. Again, I said that there are benefits (and also trade-offs), but that this isn't game-changing. I'm not clear on where we disagree.
aswanson 14y ago
Yeah, I've taken that tack "the more sensational the title, the better I'm off reading the commentary to the submission to satisfy my curiosity rather than clicking through the link and rewarding a hypeman/bullshitter."

mvkel 14y ago

Literally.

mgkimsal 14y ago
It was necessary lest you think they only meant that it would change the startup world figuratively. There's an important difference.
- drivingmenuts 14y ago
  Is it OK to think that both of those words are overused?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ionforce 14y ago

This is literally a horrible headline.

billpatrianakos 14y ago

Hey, Tikhon, we know you're proud of Parse and you really should be because it's awesome but taking liberties with a headline like you did there might not be so cool. It can be taken one of two ways: 1. The founder of Parse is a total egomaniac. 2. The founder of Parse is really proud of his company and has a great sense of humor. Parse is awesome though. I signed up back when you guys were first opening it up to people and I remember you sent out a lot of emails to get people to come back and keep using it and you have great documentation and tutorials. I see it "changing the way the app industry works" in the same way AWS, Heroku, and others changed how people thought about web app deployment. The big deal is in giving more people access to the tools they need to run a mobile app that they either couldn't build or afford before. That's awesome because lots of people will build some cool things with Parse... And amateurs like me will be able to churn out crap much quicker and cheaper. Awesome!

Sam_Odio 14y ago
HN headlines are often changed by moderators to match the article's title. That might have happened here.
jmharvey 14y ago
How did he take liberties with the headline? "This Startup Could Literally Change The Way The Entire App Industry Works" is the actual headline from Business Insider.
- lchang 14y ago
  The Business Insider can be a bit on the sensationalist side. I don't want to say tabloid but they're around TechCrunch levels of overexaggeration.
- billpatrianakos 14y ago
  The link sent me to Yahoo Finance which had a headline that didn't include about 99% of the words in the headline here. Oh well, my mistake.
  - 14y ago

calciphus 14y ago

Will it change how the entire app industry works? Not really. Will it make life easier for some developers? Probably. Having used Parse in the past and ultimately dropped it for a custom backend, let's take a look at where Parse fits really well: 1) You're a one-off or small dev shop with no web experience, and making a basic data store with a JSON API as a backend is beyond your technical means (this is by far the best use). 2) Your data isn't that complex (stuff like high scores and the like), so the fact that this is just a big Key/Value store won't harm your performance much. 3) You also don't need any server-side intelligence, just a data store an an API. 4) Your growth and revenue model is in line with the pricing model of the service you selected. Now here's the things I struggle with, and why where I work when we develop mobile apps, we stay away from Parse/Stackmob/Kinvey/Appcelerator ACS/Whoever. These apply to our customers / projects, and may not be the same for you. 1) We almost always want our server to be intelligent, not just an API-wrapped database. When I want to trigger push notifications, I want to do it with server-side logic, not everything running in the app. Our big beefy AWS servers are way more capable than someone's 2-year-old free Smartphone. 2) It doesn't take long for monthly fees to outpace the cost of just having your own server, or eat into your profitability. Most of these services work out to about 3-5 cents per user per month. Depending on the size and complexity of the app, and what the revenue generated from it looks like, that can be vastly more expensive than a small AWS or Heroku deployment. 3) It's rare that we need a data store as simple as "users + key/value". It's one thing to build a basic chat app or worldwide high score in a system like that. It's another to try and build an inventory tool or CRM. 4) Mobile data connectivity is high-latency and unreliable. Making a dozen API calls to populate a single screen is not only inefficient, it can be very frustrating to your users. An API call for a screen/view/fragment should return exactly the data needed, no more, no less. Let the database do what databases do best: sort and collect data. Let the phone just display it. So really, for small apps or apps with relatively simple data requirements, Parse does a fine job, especially if you don't have server people on your team (in which case, BaaS is your only real option). If the app's data is going to be complex, require server-side logic or have any kind of complexity that would involve optimized API calls? You're probably better building your own.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

" Using Parse can lower your development time by 10x to 100x. Developers go from taking weeks to build an app to being able to build one and push it out in a matter of hours. " So here is an interesting question. If you can build an app in a matter of minutes, how much is it worth? I ask because there is often a strong correlation between economic value and the time it takes to produce something. For example, movies produced in a couple of days often have a lower economic return than movies that take months to produce. Even including pornography in that mix, sans outliers like Paris Hilton, there seems to be a strong relationship between time and value. Presumably Parse makes the implementation stage easier, but is that for all types of App? Or is it a class of App? It would need to be the former to 'change the industry' but what does that mean about the economic value of the industry to begin with? Clearly this is part of a much bigger question of the economic value of 'Apps' in general. We are evolving models based on various metrics of course, and I'm curious does this 'destroy' value or does it 'grow' the market, or something else entirely.

tom_b 14y ago
This is an important question for software development in general. I find it interesting to see just how much simple tasks (say parsing data and combining it with other data) results in significant improvements in user experience. I am not in the "everyone should learn to code" camp, but I sometimes think that everyone should know a few standard Unix command line tools. Maybe the link between effort and economic gain will balance back out sometime. Maybe right now is just one of those boom times in history and useful tool creators are in position to reap the benefits.
astine 14y ago
You're talking about the supply side of the supply/demand equation. Essentially, the greater the supply of something, the lower the price one can charge for it. Reducing the cost of production effectively increases the supply, so it ultimately reduces the price as well. Ultimately, what this means is that the competition will be harsher and that will drive the prices down. This won't drive down the value of the mobile market in general, just the prices of individual apps (though they are already fairly low.) In fact, generally when the supply goes up, the total income of the industry as a whole goes up as well because marginal consumers will now participate due to lower prices.

bbayer 14y ago

just an article of "One Ring to rule them all" phenomenon. Entire app industry contains lots of different usage scenarios. It is literally impossible for a platform/library to fit all type of requirements.

bsaul 14y ago

Anyone knows how Parse's server side is done ? By looking at their API i would say something like AWS + MongoDB, but they don't seem to have known the same kind of problems as Heroku when Amazon went down the other day. So maybe they're using else. Anyone ?

tluyben2 14y ago

How about lock-in? What's your (the users/owners) stance on that? It seems my app will be completely hanging on Parse.com; they can change the pricing, go bankrupt, get hacked, get bought, go down(AWS) or whatever scenario making me wish I didn't use them? This functionality seems a bit too crucial/low-level to be not in-house or open source.

inlined 14y ago
Parse lets you easily export all your data from their servers; they don't intend to lock you in. http://blog.parse.com/2012/03/09/one-click-export/ http://blog.parse.com/2012/03/09/one-click-export/
- zmitri 14y ago
  Even your users? Do they give you password hashes? How does that work?
- tluyben2 14y ago
  Yeah, but exporting is not really an option... When you are running, have massive traffic, 100+ million api requests/month etc, it's not very interesting that you can 'export all data'. I need the services otherwise I need to rebuild them right? I would consider this a massive risk for my business. Which happens with most PAAS/SAAS thing ofcourse, but this seems to be very fundamental to my apps; I mean; apps won't work without this service. I like the Ning proposition; if you want you just download the source + data and run on your own servers. Or there should be a buy-out for the software, maybe depending on the number of average monthly API requests you did until that time with some kind of minimum. For stuff this low-level I think a (restricted) open source model is the only way to go to prevent lock-in to be honest.

djbender 14y ago

LITERALLY

uwemaurer 14y ago

Currently the usage of the Parse SDK for Android is marginal: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/parse/parse http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/parse/parse

raheemm 14y ago

Is Parse a specialized hosting/API environment for mobile apps? Or is it more like a weebly for mobile apps?

benthumb 14y ago

As a sometime developer myself and late-blooming CS student I see things like this and start to feel insecure about my place in the world... if the barrier to entry keeps getting lower so that anybody can build an app, what's the point? Obviously, I need not feel this way. Why? b/c this trend where eventually 'civilians' w/ no training in info tech or knowledge of conventional programming languages will be in a position to build stuff on the fly implies that the state of the art of software engineering is going to be miles from where we are today, and to me this is a good thing: hardcore software engineers have always been focused on making tools.

teyc 14y ago

I was hoping to find something more substantial and was disappointed to read what is essentially a piece of PR fluff. One point got me curious though: what kind of apps are built in one day? Anyone in the app-space care to elaborate?