Parse — The Backend Facebook Bought, Then Switched Off Under Half a Million Apps

Parse was a mobile backend-as-a-service — a hosted set of tools that let an app developer skip building and running servers entirely — and on January 28, 2017 Facebook switched it off. Founded in 2011 by Tikhon Bernstam, Ilya Sukhar, James Yu, and Kevin Lacker, Parse sold a deceptively simple promise: write your iOS or Android app, point it at Parse for data storage, user logins, and push notifications, and never think about a database, a server, or a sysadmin again. For a generation of mobile startups and solo developers, that promise was irresistible, and Parse grew fast.

In April 2013 Facebook acquired the company in a deal widely reported at roughly $85 million, its first serious move into paid developer tools. Under Facebook’s banner Parse kept growing; by 2014 it was reported to power around 500,000 mobile apps, and at shutdown TechCrunch noted that at one point some 600,000 apps relied on the platform. For nearly three years it looked like a rare example of a developer service that an acquisition had strengthened rather than smothered.

Then, on January 28, 2016, Facebook announced that Parse would be wound down over exactly one year and shut for good on January 28, 2017. There was no scandal, no security breach, no collapse in usage cited — only a corporate decision to focus elsewhere. Facebook gave developers a year, a database-migration guide, and, unusually, the platform’s own source code, open-sourced the same day as Parse Server so that anyone could stand up their own copy. It was about as graceful as a shutdown gets, and it still stranded hundreds of thousands of apps whose owners had to scramble to migrate or go dark.

That is the lasting weight of the Parse story. Tens of thousands of developers had taken Facebook at its word and built their products on infrastructure they did not control. When the owner’s priorities changed, the polite one-year window did nothing to change the basic fact: every one of those teams now had to rebuild the foundation of a shipping product, on a deadline they did not set, for a reason that had nothing to do with them.

Mailbox — The Email App Dropbox Bought, Stalled, and Switched Off

Mailbox was the iOS email app that arrived in February 2013 as the most wanted download in the App Store, and on February 26, 2016 its owner Dropbox switched it off without ceremony. Built by a tiny San Francisco startup called Orchestra, it reimagined the mobile inbox around two gestures — a short swipe to archive, a long swipe to snooze a message until later — and around the idea, briefly seductive, that email could be tamed into a to-do list you actually cleared. For a few weeks in early 2013 it was the most talked-about app in technology.

What made Mailbox a phenomenon before anyone had used it was the waitlist. Rather than open the doors, Orchestra made every new user take a numbered ticket and watch a live queue counter tick down the hundreds of thousands of people ahead of them. The artificial scarcity worked exactly as designed: it manufactured demand, generated weeks of press, and turned a free email client into an event. Then, barely a month after launch, Dropbox acquired the company for a figure reported at roughly $100 million — and the app’s real purpose quietly changed.

Because the acquisition was never really about email. Dropbox, then racing to justify a multibillion-dollar valuation, wanted Orchestra’s design talent and a beachhead on mobile, and Mailbox was the vehicle. The app got an Android version and a Mac beta in 2014, and then very little else. By late 2015 Dropbox had decided that its future was workplace collaboration, that email was not core, and — in its own words — that it could not “fundamentally fix” the inbox. On December 7, 2015 it announced that Mailbox and its photo app Carousel would both close.

When the servers went dark on February 26, 2016, the lesson was already written: Mailbox was an acqui-hire that was never built to last, a beloved product acquired chiefly for the people who made it. The gestures it popularized — swipe to archive, snooze for later — outlived the app by years, absorbed into Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail. The app itself became a tidy parable about what happens when a product millions queued for becomes, on the acquirer’s balance sheet, a means to an end.