Well damn. If you wander to the “Projects” section of this website you will see my Android apps are all Parse-based. If you are a Parse user yourself, you are probably now aware of today’s announcement. This sucks.
I chose Parse because it was straightforward. I wanted to spent my time developing my app, not deploying, updating, migrating, and whatever else-ing a database on my server. Parse allowed me to do that, pretty easily. There was some headache with earlier versions of Parse which required a Javascript middleman between the app and the database to perform certain queries, but hey, any chance to brush up on a rarely used language isn’t that bad. I then went through the pain of upgrading my apps when they put the API through a fairly major overhaul. It was worth it because it allowed me to ignore that entire side of the app. My data would be sitting on a Parse sever and would be easily accessible, no worries.
Now that is going away. Parse is officially recommending a slow migration to a MongoDB setup followed by a hosting switch where you can run the new open source Parse Server to connect to your fancy new MongoDB instance. Blerg. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, I like the fact that I have working apps available, but they aren’t exactly tearing up the Google Play store rankings, so I have to decide what level of effort is acceptable to support essentially unused apps.
The lesson here, I guess, is to be weary of anybody offering you a sweet free service. Or, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Or something else, I don’t really know. For now, I’ve got a year to switch away from Parse or let my apps die a slow, quiet, unnoticed death.