
This Startup Could Literally Change The Way The Entire App Industry Works - tikhon
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-one-most-important-startups-185800061.html
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thedufer
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
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
> 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.

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calciphus
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.

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ChuckMcM
_" 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.

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jiggity
You are grossly underestimating the effort it takes to find an interesting
problem and then find an interesting solution.

Think of it in terms of Legos. Parse is an automatically sorted tray of Lego
pieces for you to use. No more prickling your hand for 3 minutes while you
search for that one piece -- no boilerplate.

You take a gymnasium filled with a 1000 7-year-olds and hold a contest to see
who builds the coolest stuff. No amount of tools is going to help the poor
kids who can't think of interesting things to build. On the other hand, one
particularly ambitious venturist decides to build a 5-foot-tall T-Rex out of
Legos. Parse rapidly accelerates the build process by providing the stuff he
needs right when he needs it.

If anything, I foresee an increase in price in the future as we see more apps
that provide more value in more sectors. App profit is not a _zero sum game_.
The profit derived will be directly proportional to the value derived.

[TLDR] - The limiting reagent to successful apps is good problems and good
solutions. Good tools merely speed up development once you have figured those
two things out.

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wallflower
Parse is good for us because we can build iCloud-like applications without
having to be solely iOS. We find storing small amounts of user-centric
customizable data a sweet spot for Parse.

Also, speaking of Lego dinosaurs:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/28888766@N02/3344166593/>

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ionforce
This is literally a horrible headline.

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bsaul
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 ?

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benthumb
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.

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tluyben2
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
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/>

~~~
tluyben2
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.

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uwemaurer
Currently the usage of the Parse SDK for Android is marginal:

<http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev>

<http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/parse/parse>

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teyc
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?

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

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bbayer
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.

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mvkel
Literally.

~~~
mgkimsal
It was necessary lest you think they only meant that it would change the
startup world _figuratively_. There's an important difference.

~~~
drivingmenuts
Is it OK to think that both of those words are overused?

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billpatrianakos
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!

~~~
jmharvey
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.

~~~
billpatrianakos
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.

~~~
eli
Yahoo syndicates business insider

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djbender
LITERALLY

