
StackMob is shutting down - aaronpk
http://pastebin.com/B6RiEqev
======
rradu
We saw this coming when they announced that they were acquired by PayPal a
couple of months ago, and read this line:

"When asked if StackMob will continue to operate as normal, he said it was too
early to tell since the acquisition just closed today."
[http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/17/paypal-acquires-
stackmob-t...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/17/paypal-acquires-stackmob-to-
build-a-better-platform-especially-for-mobile/)

That was dead giveaway that they'd shut it down. We instead chose Parse for a
project we were just starting, and it's worked out pretty well (except for the
bugs they've been having the past week which don't allow us to create new
columns or deploy).

~~~
fizzbar
> (except for the bugs they've been having the past week which don't allow us
> to create new columns or deploy)

thanks for reminding me why i'll never outsource my app's primary datastore.
'tis a bridge too far.

~~~
jchrisa
If you want data sync capability and you prefer to run your own databases,
Couchbase Lite is an open-source iOS and Android JSON database that syncs with
Couchbase running on your servers.

[http://mobile.couchbase.com](http://mobile.couchbase.com)

It's not a full app platform like Parse and StackMob, we are focussed on the
data layer challenge.

~~~
fizzbar
I'm all about the Couch/Pouch ecosystem. :)

------
fbpcm
Here's StackMob recommending people switch from Parse after FB acquired them.

[https://blog.stackmob.com/2013/04/27011/](https://blog.stackmob.com/2013/04/27011/)

------
dfcarney
"Thank you, our customers, for believing in us." is such an obnoxious and
insincere statement. If anything, their customers only went with them because
StackMob gave assurances (or at least the impression) of stability. I wish
they were just upfront, sincere, and a bit apologetic.

------
rurounijones
Question:

Do the kind of people who work at places like stackmob, once their product has
been killed, really want to work in other departments at paypal upgrading
ancient systems?

(According to the article rradu posted this was why they were aquihired)

It seems like they would run away as soon as possible since they worked at a
place like stackmob over paypal in the first place. (I assume there are some
sort of retention bonuses etc to try and keep them.)

~~~
gamache
I worked at a PayPal acqui-hire. For a while, it was pretty good! We suddenly
had EBAY RSU's instead of maybe-someday-money and the work didn't change (as
the mothership decided what exactly to do with us). That lasted about three
months, after which our product got spiked and we were tossed in on very
PayPal-y projects.

To answer your question: not really. Some of us found a niche at a place like
PayPal, but a lot of us tried and weren't cut out for it.

My heart goes out to StackMob and its employees. Get paid.

~~~
rhizome
Same happened to me somewhere else. My advice for these situations is ASAP or
GTFO the acquired unit. ASAP, lateral into the larger company if that's the
kind of place you think you want to work, or GTFO the whole place whenever you
feel like it. Regardless, get away from the acquired company so you don't
become deadwood.

------
jey
Ouch, so any product that relies on StackMob will need to reimplement and
deploy its entire backend by May 11th?

~~~
aaronpk
Sounds like an opportunity for some of the other backend providers to create a
migration guide and import tools!

~~~
camus2
Sounds more like one should not use this kind of solution unless it's very
temporary or one is building a quick prototype. What about businesses that
relied on stackmob? welcome to the Baas area.

~~~
Fasebook
I get all my Baas needs from local retail.

------
ipsin
Might as well wait for something more official than a message on pastebin?

~~~
ndrake
I got an email from Pastebin about it.

~~~
ben0x539
Wow, what a service.

~~~
ndrake
:)

------
mukundmr
When I did my study on the BaaS providers last year, most of them were venture
funded and not profit making and almost all of them were in the business for
only a few short years. The only profit making / long term businesses that
were into this space were Kii and Apigee App Services. The rest appeared to be
candidates for acquisition.

------
bashcoder
> Thank you, our customers, for believing in us. It’s because of you that
> we’re able to move on, to rise to a new challenge, and to make a real
> difference.

I'm always happy when a company does well. But when a company's success isn't
in the best interest of their customers, there's a fundamental disconnect. It
is, after all, possible to advocate for existing customers during M&A
negotiations.

In this case, their believing customers are now rewarded by having their
software assets freshly encumbered by technical debt. What was sold as a
solution is now a problem. So maybe it's just me, but it seems that the proper
disposition should be one of apology, not celebration.

------
jmduke
As context, StackMob was acquired less than two months ago (December 17th) by
PayPal.

------
adammil
The announcement was good enough for pastebin but not their own homepage?

------
mathattack
A lot of folks are writing that this is bad for employees. Is it worse for
employees (who may have been sold a bill of goods joining) or worse for
customers (who may have been sold a bill of goods signing up)?

My sense is there is a little bit of "Let the buyer beware" on both because
both employees and customers know what they're getting into with a startup.
That said, the employees should at least get some stock out of it. Should
early customers ask for stock too?

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
From the perspective of a non-paying customer who was testing out the service
although not seriously considering it I am kind of shocked even though I know
I should not be. This will damage all their competitors in BaaS. No way anyone
with any sense would want to risk this sort of thing again, this confirms the
worst fears of using service like this. Amazon may well be the winner as usual
when custom solutions become more favourable again.

------
andreas_fey
Hi, I work at apiOmat ([http://www.apiomat.com](http://www.apiomat.com)).

We will provide a migration script for former Stackmob users later this day,
so getting apps back running should be a minimum pain. Also, to compensate for
your lost time, you can get one month free medium plan with the voucher
"stackmobOmat" :-)

------
jeffgreco
This was my fear for Parse after FB acquired them. Are there any other
interesting competitors to Parse out there?

~~~
csmajorfive
You could just use Parse. We're not going anywhere.

~~~
teacup50
Or, you could learn from this, and not use Parse.

~~~
AznHisoka
I don't get why anyone in their right mind would invest in a Backend as a
service. Ok, maybe things like image uploading, or what not, but not the
entire back-end.

~~~
fokinsean
I am creating an app as a side project and this makes it a lot more
manageable. It is my first time messing with web dev and would rather focus my
time developing it instead of having to learn a lot of back-end as well. I
understand where you are coming from though. I would like to learn back-end
but I already have a lot to learn.

------
nayefc
Can a team of 24 people fix PayPal? No.

------
apierre
I am also considering to use Parse but I am still tempted to use StrongLoop
([http://strongloop.com/mobile-application-
development/loopbac...](http://strongloop.com/mobile-application-
development/loopback/))

------
cmelbye
"To ease the transition, we are launching a data exporter to help you get all
your data out of StackMob in CSV format."

Ouch, that's probably the bare minimum they could've possibly done.

------
Faryar
Poor developers who thought they can rely on them!

------
jasonlotito
From their home page...

Partners and Customers who Trust StackMob

------
pbreit
Shouldn't they be able to find someone to take over the service? I realize
that's not a big priority but still.

~~~
helper
They couldn't turn a profit from their business, why do you think someone else
would want it?

~~~
damian2000
Or they could open source it - if there's any big customers they could put
some of their own developers onto it.

------
yungether
Congratulations on failing fast. Onwards and upwards.

~~~
mcmatterson
Does Poe's Law apply here?

(Picture Fry meme:)

Can't tell if sarcasm, or sincerity.

~~~
waqasm
Wow thats a bit too soon. Thats why vendor viability is equally, if not more
important than product features:
[http://blog.kii.com/?p=2204](http://blog.kii.com/?p=2204)

~~~
mcmatterson
Or as an old boss of mine used to say: "Never outsource something hard to
replace".

~~~
dfcarney
How about, "Pick your battles"? I agree that it's ideal to own something vital
to your business or a product, but if you're trying to validate an idea and
get something to market ASAP then outsourcing and/or using 3rd-party services
can make a big difference. Trying to do everything yourself is a slippery
slope. Related:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here)

~~~
mcmatterson
I always took his statement to mean that if something is essential to your
business, you should think very carefully about the risks inherent in
outsourcing it. The two major exceptions to this are

1\. Things which aren't essential to your business. (e.g.: things that could
be replaced by nothing (even if just temporarily))

2\. Things which meet the definition of a commodity, in the formal 'fungible
goods' sense of the word.

Many .?aaS offerings fail both of these tests in that they're an essential
component of a service, and also fail the commodity test in that there is
qualitative differentiation between offerings. The features of EC2 (used to
their fullest) are wildly different than those of Rackspace, and the two are
only really fungible with one another across a small subset of their feature
sets.

Examples of offerings that pass this commodity test include:

\- Most mailers (sendgrid, mailgun, postmark, &c) _when used simply_.
Switching from one backend to another isn't a huge endeavour, as they are all
cut from conceptually similar cloth.

\- VPS offerings _when used simply_ (notice a pattern here?). A basic Ubuntu
box in the cloud is a basic Ubuntu box in the cloud.

In contrast, Stackmob, Parse, et al. all fail this commodity test _hard_.
Switching costs are very high (especially with Stackmob, whose iOS SDK bleeds
anti-patterns all over your app), data migration is a nightmare, and major
architectural assumptions can vanish in an instant

Part of the bargain of leaning on non-commoditized offerings to back essential
services is accepting the risk that they may one day leave you in the lurch.
In the metaphor of technical debt, outsourced services are extending you
credit to finance your technical debt. Having one of your outsourced
dependencies close up shop is really just them calling in their debts.

Of course, there's no right answer. I agree completely that the point is moot
unless you ship; the GP wasn't really intended to be imperative; it was meant
(or at least it was always how I understood it) as more as a heuristic to
assess the risk associated with outsourcing a core dependency that can't be
easily hedged.

------
notastartup
curious to know how you can use [http://baasbox.com](http://baasbox.com) and
deploy it on EC2. It's open source and free, but I guess mobile developers
don't like backend work.

~~~
jnbiche
baasbox looks interesting except for the fact that they apparently created
their own custom database system. Why? Even if they wanted to stay within the
Java ecosystem, there are so many good databases already available in Java.

Just seems like a waste of effort just because someone wanted to write his own
database software.

But deploying it looks like a snap. They have documentation on how to do this
on their site.

~~~
funkyboy
Baasbox DB is orientdb, which is open source:
[https://github.com/orientechnologies/orientdb](https://github.com/orientechnologies/orientdb)

~~~
jnbiche
Oh wow, apologies for the misstatement. I glanced at the docs, features, and
github, and didn't see any sign or mention of a DB dependency, so I assumed
they had written their own.

Sorry to the baasbox db team for the incorrect assumption. But it might be a
good idea to make the underlying db a bit clearer, assuming I didn't miss any
obvious mention of it (which is quite possible).

orientdb is a fine db, indeed it's one I was thinking of when I was wondering
(incorrectly) why they wrote their own.

Thanks for your correction.

~~~
funkyboy
Our stance is that, as an app developer, you should not care too much about
the technology behind a backend. You should rather stay focused on the front
end.

~~~
notastartup
so my question is why don't most mobile app developers use something like
Baasbox, or spin up any REST api on their servers?

What is the benefit of using proprietary platforms like Parse and Stackmob?

~~~
funkyboy
My guess is just one: BaasBox is born 6mo ago :) But we are spreading the
voice ...

