My take on Parse is that they do the grunt work that is necessary with every new project. I am currently building an iPad game on top of parse, and while the pricing is a bit concerning, I figure one of two things will happen:
1) The game takes off and the $200/mo is affordable
2) The game doesn't take off and the 5mil requests is adequate.
The lock-in concerns are valid, but right now their API isn't so mature that it would take eons to build out the pieces I am using in a week or two.
As for the concern with them going out of business, they've raised a good bit of funding, and offer data dumps so you can migrate elsewhere if need be.
For me, right now the ease of development outweighs the risk (we'll see in time though...)
With regards to concerns around price: I actually did a comparison between Parse (which I use on some iOS apps) and StackMob, their nearest mobile competitor, and Parse actually came out very well in terms of price (although not so much on some more enterprise level features).
1) It makes user management stupid-simple. I can authenticate with Facebook/Twitter/signup easily (not that it's really that hard, but still), and the user info is automatically saved to the cloud.
2) I then use it to store game state, retrieve a list of active games/previous games.
3) Push notifications are really easy. Each client opens a "channel", and the other client sends a push to their opponent's channel after their turn is complete.
I suppose I should clarify that I am building a turn-based iPad game, where the game state needs to be stored between turns.
(I was going to write you offline but you do not have an email associated with your HN account.)
I too am developing a turn-based iOS game using Parse. I've found the entire process to be painless. It's a shame Game Center's turn-based API has so many issues [1]
Perhaps if iOS 6 is announced at WWDC some of these Game Center issues will be included? For now it's easy enough on Parse to do the equivalent work "by hand".
1) The game takes off and the $200/mo is affordable 2) The game doesn't take off and the 5mil requests is adequate.
The lock-in concerns are valid, but right now their API isn't so mature that it would take eons to build out the pieces I am using in a week or two.
As for the concern with them going out of business, they've raised a good bit of funding, and offer data dumps so you can migrate elsewhere if need be.
For me, right now the ease of development outweighs the risk (we'll see in time though...)