Developer here. I wanted to try out Parse for mobile apps, so I came up with something fun to build: a messaging app that automatically translates your message into Pig Latin and other gibberish languages.
For the backend, I used Parse and was really pleased. From a developer perspective, Parse was really easy to use and integrate. I had previous experience with Mongo, so their data structure wasn't unfamiliar. Both their iOS and Android SDK's were nice to use. I've used lots of different SDK's in mobile apps and I would say Parse ranks up there in terms of ease of use and documentation. And from someone who develops both iOS and Android, I really appreciated that there was a consistent naming convention for their methods across both platforms. I really hate when an SDK has slightly different names for each platform.
My only ding for Parse would be support. They recently transitioned their support forums from an in-house forum to using Stackoverflow. All the old threads are still indexed by Google and show up in results, but these old posts reference older versions of the Parse api. And I found it a little hard to sometimes find what I was looking for in SO. I will say that the Parse documentation is really nice. So I only had to turn to the support forums for some rare cases.
For the backend, I used Parse and was really pleased. From a developer perspective, Parse was really easy to use and integrate. I had previous experience with Mongo, so their data structure wasn't unfamiliar. Both their iOS and Android SDK's were nice to use. I've used lots of different SDK's in mobile apps and I would say Parse ranks up there in terms of ease of use and documentation. And from someone who develops both iOS and Android, I really appreciated that there was a consistent naming convention for their methods across both platforms. I really hate when an SDK has slightly different names for each platform.
My only ding for Parse would be support. They recently transitioned their support forums from an in-house forum to using Stackoverflow. All the old threads are still indexed by Google and show up in results, but these old posts reference older versions of the Parse api. And I found it a little hard to sometimes find what I was looking for in SO. I will say that the Parse documentation is really nice. So I only had to turn to the support forums for some rare cases.