Our experience with Parse has been absolutely terrible. A couple weeks ago, their servers went offline for hours in the middle of the day. When they came back up, all of the relation columns in an entire production database for one of our client's apps were magically deleted. This created a myriad of issues that we had to painstakingly traverse. To make it even worse, they have no true concept of backup and restore. Sure, you can backup and restore regular data columns and pointers, but there is no way to restore relational data through their data browser. Go ahead, try, it just errors.
If that's not enough, they constantly change the way things work on the back end. Is your app working perfectly this week? Great, it won't be next week. All of the sudden you could no longer check if an object was equal to [NSNull null] - the way I'd seen as a recommendation on their own forums multiple times, and something that was working perfectly until one day, it simply stopped working without any client or cloud code changes. This caused queries in a production app to suddenly start returning wrong data, and chaos followed.
As far as support, it has been a joke. We have reported showstopper bugs multiple times, and every time we are met with rude responses, followed by NO ONE addressing the issue for weeks, then the issue magically gets closed. I'm sorry, but if you can't backup or restore data on their platform, they probably shouldn't be spending so much time redoing your website every other week. It'd be nice if they'd fix mission critical features instead.
Lastly, the downtime and limitations. They go down literally 10 times a day for short periods. If you're an active developer, you've definitely noticed this. The least they could do is acknowledge the regular service interruptions on their status page, and have some accountability for the slowness. We will be developing a data migration tool for people who want to escape this terrible platform, and the tool will allow for migration of their data to a MySQL setup. In the time we've wasted trying to work around their countless limitations, we could have build complete custom REST APIs for our clients.
Our experience with Parse has been absolutely terrible. A couple weeks ago, their servers went offline for hours in the middle of the day. When they came back up, all of the relation columns in an entire production database for one of our client's apps were magically deleted. This created a myriad of issues that we had to painstakingly traverse. To make it even worse, they have no true concept of backup and restore. Sure, you can backup and restore regular data columns and pointers, but there is no way to restore relational data through their data browser. Go ahead, try, it just errors.
If that's not enough, they constantly change the way things work on the back end. Is your app working perfectly this week? Great, it won't be next week. All of the sudden you could no longer check if an object was equal to [NSNull null] - the way I'd seen as a recommendation on their own forums multiple times, and something that was working perfectly until one day, it simply stopped working without any client or cloud code changes. This caused queries in a production app to suddenly start returning wrong data, and chaos followed.
As far as support, it has been a joke. We have reported showstopper bugs multiple times, and every time we are met with rude responses, followed by NO ONE addressing the issue for weeks, then the issue magically gets closed. I'm sorry, but if you can't backup or restore data on their platform, they probably shouldn't be spending so much time redoing your website every other week. It'd be nice if they'd fix mission critical features instead.
Lastly, the downtime and limitations. They go down literally 10 times a day for short periods. If you're an active developer, you've definitely noticed this. The least they could do is acknowledge the regular service interruptions on their status page, and have some accountability for the slowness. We will be developing a data migration tool for people who want to escape this terrible platform, and the tool will allow for migration of their data to a MySQL setup. In the time we've wasted trying to work around their countless limitations, we could have build complete custom REST APIs for our clients.
If that's not enough, they constantly change the way things work on the back end. Is your app working perfectly this week? Great, it won't be next week. All of the sudden you could no longer check if an object was equal to [NSNull null] - the way I'd seen as a recommendation on their own forums multiple times, and something that was working perfectly until one day, it simply stopped working without any client or cloud code changes. This caused queries in a production app to suddenly start returning wrong data, and chaos followed.
As far as support, it has been a joke. We have reported showstopper bugs multiple times, and every time we are met with rude responses, followed by NO ONE addressing the issue for weeks, then the issue magically gets closed. I'm sorry, but if you can't backup or restore data on their platform, they probably shouldn't be spending so much time redoing your website every other week. It'd be nice if they'd fix mission critical features instead.
Lastly, the downtime and limitations. They go down literally 10 times a day for short periods. If you're an active developer, you've definitely noticed this. The least they could do is acknowledge the regular service interruptions on their status page, and have some accountability for the slowness. We will be developing a data migration tool for people who want to escape this terrible platform, and the tool will allow for migration of their data to a MySQL setup. In the time we've wasted trying to work around their countless limitations, we could have build complete custom REST APIs for our clients.