This Startup Could Literally Change The Way The Entire App Industry Works

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-one-most-important-startups-185800061.html

by tikhon • 14 years ago

126 40 14 years ago

finance.yahoo.com

thedufer2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

thedufer2• 14 years ago

> 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.

aswanson• 14 years ago

Yeah, I've taken that tack "the more sensational the title, the better I'm off reading the commentary to the submission to satisfy my curiosity rather than clicking through the link and rewarding a hypeman/bullshitter."

mvkel• 14 years ago

Literally.

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

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

drivingmenuts• 14 years ago

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

ionforce• 14 years ago

This is literally a horrible headline.

billpatrianakos2• 14 years ago

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!

Sam_Odio• 14 years ago

HN headlines are often changed by moderators to match the article's title. That might have happened here.

jmharvey• 14 years ago

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.

lchang• 14 years ago

The Business Insider can be a bit on the sensationalist side. I don't want to say tabloid but they're around TechCrunch levels of overexaggeration.

billpatrianakos2• 14 years ago

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.

calciphus• 14 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

" 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.

tom_b• 14 years ago

This is an important question for software development in general. I find it interesting to see just how much simple tasks (say parsing data and combining it with other data) results in significant improvements in user experience.

I am not in the "everyone should learn to code" camp, but I sometimes think that everyone should know a few standard Unix command line tools.

Maybe the link between effort and economic gain will balance back out sometime. Maybe right now is just one of those boom times in history and useful tool creators are in position to reap the benefits.

astine2• 14 years ago

You're talking about the supply side of the supply/demand equation. Essentially, the greater the supply of something, the lower the price one can charge for it. Reducing the cost of production effectively increases the supply, so it ultimately reduces the price as well.

Ultimately, what this means is that the competition will be harsher and that will drive the prices down. This won't drive down the value of the mobile market in general, just the prices of individual apps (though they are already fairly low.) In fact, generally when the supply goes up, the total income of the industry as a whole goes up as well because marginal consumers will now participate due to lower prices.

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

[ disclaimer, I am an armchair economist ]

"You're talking about the supply side of the supply/demand equation. Essentially, the greater the supply of something, the lower the price one can charge for it. Reducing the cost of production effectively increases the supply, so it ultimately reduces the price as well."

No I am not. One of my areas of research has been the economics of information. Unlike classic 'real goods' economics which are driven by supply and demand, information economics are driven by other forces. One of the paradoxes this sorts out is how something can be 'free' to produce and still have economic value.

In the case of creative works, I theorize that the economic value derives from the creativity itself. One might pay to see a play rather than read it for free because the 'value' is watching the theater bring the work to life. Similarly with 'apps' in that you might pay for one that saves time, or automates a loathsome task, Etc. So the economic question becomes what does it cost to 'produce' (which is go from nothing to something) the work, vs what is the economic value of utilizing the work (aka the desire to have that problem solved). For some things, like Uber (which automates finding the nearest car available for hire) many people 'desire' to have that problem solved and it motivates them to give economic value to possess that capability. (or buy the app, subscribe to the service, etc).

So Parse lowers the cost of converting idea into App, which lowers the economic cost to develop an idea, does it have the same economic value to the recipient? Let me use an example that might illustrate what I'm trying to say.

Lets say you've got a neighbor with a rude dog which barks every time you walk out the front door. This is annoying. Now someone offers to fix it so that you don't have to deal with it, and their 'fix' is to put a giant tube down your front sidewalk so the dog can't see you leave. You might find no value at all in that solution because you could do the same thing and the giant tube looks stupid. Or the person might be some sort of dog whisperer type who could go over and train the dog to not respond like that when they see you. Well in the latter case there is a higher perceived economic value since you don't possess 'dog whisperer' skills and thus you could not implement the solution yourself. But the tube thing, well you could do that if you wanted too.

So back to Apps, what is the economic value of an app you really could create yourself in a 'couple of hours' ? Probably not a whole lot. But if it would take you 'weeks' to make that app, well you're willing to spend $4 to have someone else do the leg work.

Information economics are driven in part by a strange opportunity cost function which I can't say I've completely characterized, but I do know that if we released a tool tomorrow that let you speak to your phone and tell it the 'feature' you wanted it to have, and some sort of thing went out and created that and dropped it on your phone. It would destroy the app ecosystem as we know it today.

Perhaps Parse + Mechanical Turk + Siri can get to that point, if so it would really change things.

Mz• 14 years ago

On the other hand, last I heard, porn tends to make money no matter how badly/quickly done. But perhaps that has changed in the years since I took economic geography.

maxwell• 14 years ago

I think more powerful tools yield different apps, not just the same apps in less time. Because of the process of human design, I doubt we'll have solid, robust, lasting apps built "in a matter of hours", but potentially more and better version 1's.

Development aside, designing, testing, marketing, etc. seem to take a certain fixed amount of thought, discussion, and reflection. So it might still take a few weeks or months to build a great app, but in that time, you could experiment more. Going from, say, days to minutes to build certain features would be incredibly valuable. You could try things you never would've had time for otherwise, and end up with apps that wouldn't've even been possible with other tools.

samstave• 14 years ago

I'd say the value comes not from the time to build, but the utility users derive from its use.

Then WORTH would be how protectable that app was. i.e. if EVERYONE can copy that app, it still has high value - but its worth may be really low.

Protection can come from network effect, IP, it being reliant on a far more complex upstream dependency etc...

jiggity• 14 years ago

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.

wallflower• 14 years ago

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/

earl• 14 years ago

I think the economic value of the app industry period has been basically kneecapped by apple anchoring $1 as the proper price of an app. There's just so much work you can put into something that earns $.70 and still make a living. And yes, nobody has a right to a living, but software gets complex fast and it's shocking how quickly even relatively simple software starts to demand a lot of time from a developer.

I'm also not privy to any of Parse's plans, but I'd bet they're going to allow server side logic. A small dev without anybody particularly experienced at being a sysadmin seems like one of their sweet spots. Learning the ins and outs of ssl / nginx / caching / security / the many unexpected ways server software will fuck you may be better outsourced.

bbayer• 14 years ago

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.

bsaul• 14 years ago

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 ?

tluyben22• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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/

zmitri• 14 years ago

Even your users? Do they give you password hashes? How does that work?

tluyben22• 14 years ago

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.

djbender• 14 years ago

LITERALLY

uwemaurer• 14 years ago

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

raheemm• 14 years ago

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

benthumb• 14 years ago

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.

teyc• 14 years ago

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?

This Startup Could Literally Change The Way The Entire App Industry Works

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