Facebook‘s mobile app development platform will be closed down six years after its founding.
Parse, a toolkit for creating and running apps, will be fully retired on 28 January 2017, its co-founder announced in a blog.
The company has committed to maintaining the backend service during the year-long sunset period. Parse will also provide several tools to help migrate applications to other services.
Firstly, it will release a database migration tool to allow data to be moved from a Parse app to a MongoDB database. The Parse API will continue to operate as usual based on the new database to prevent downtime.
The company will also release the open source Parse Server, allowing customers to run most of the Parse API from their Node.js server.
First founded in 2011, the tool was acquired by Facebook in 2013 for a $85 million, reportedly.
"Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense," wrote co-founder Ilya Sukhar in a blog at the time. "In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers."
It is unclear why the platform is being closed down now.
"We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible," wrote Kevin Lucker, the co-founder.
