Facebook acquired the mobile-development platform Parse in 2013 and later made its software open source.
Parse was founded in 2011 by Ilya Sukhar and James Yu as a backend service designed to simplify mobile-app development. Developers could use it for features such as data storage, user accounts, push notifications, and file hosting without building every server component themselves.
Facebook announced the acquisition in April 2013. The deal reflected Facebook’s interest in helping developers create mobile applications and connect them with its platform. Parse continued operating as a Facebook service for several years, but Facebook announced in 2016 that the hosted Parse service would shut down.
A common mix-up is confusing Parse with Firebase, another mobile backend platform that Google acquired in 2014. Parse was not Facebook’s programming language or machine-learning framework; it was a backend-as-a-service platform. Facebook subsequently released the Parse Server technology as open source, allowing developers to run it themselves.