How To Migrate Your Android App From Parse?

Featured article by Ritesh Patil, co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech

The news most app developers dreaded came out last month – Parse was going to shut down, and it was only one year in which you could make any pending Parse migrations. This was akin to a tech tsunami, the closure of Parse. Parse has been hosting apps for some time now and doing a pretty good job at that. In fact they were doing everything. The entire back end work was being handled by parse and all the app owners and stakeholders would do was count their earnings.

With January 17, 2017, the date announced by Facebook as the day Parse would call its last, here are a few quick ways, users can migrate their data and app elsewhere.

The cloud computing services market is undoubtedly one of the most competitive. You have a number of companies providing services like building and hosting your apps.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure Sales force Heroku are some of them. These companies offer utility services which are flexible, affordable with ease of usage.

Going by the market report, AWS is undoubtedly the market leader. It also offers a large number of services at real affordable prices for the kind of services it offers. Sales force Heroku also stands a great chance to benefit from the closure of Parse’s closure. There has been an existing partnership between Parse and Heroku; hence this seems to be a very simple alternative.

Any company trying to take over your app’s hosting responsibilities needs to have the following:

– iOS and Android SDKs availability

– A clear and automated backup plan

The Parse team has recommended a five step migration plan which will ensure your app and data gets transferred from Parse to the targeted hosting platform.

1. Move your data from Parse to any self-hosted database. Quite a few are there, namely Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC) but Parse recommends MongoDB.

2. Now is the step where you need to create a local Parse Server in which your app will run but will be pulling data from the database.

3. The migration of the cloud code to the Parse Server takes place. Due to its announced closure some of the native Parse modules are unavailable on the Parse Server. This indeed cannot be good news to app developers though it should not stop them from migrating nonetheless.

4. The Infrastructure providers we had talked about earlier come into play now. This is the time when you deploy your Parse Server to any of the infrastructure service providers, namely AWS, Heruko and more. Make all the necessary changes to the code set because the apps will undergo certain changes as the data does while the migration takes place. At the end of this step you are certain to get a renewed app in a new setting and environment.

5. Publish your new app in any of the App store which replaces your old one.

Parse has made it easier for developers to migrate their wares from Parse based servers to other servers and have also published a Parse Migration Kit, which gives one a detailed description of the movement.

Do remember, after the migration a bit of tweaking of the codes will be necessary because of the change of environment. An estimated 20 to 30% of recoding will be needed to renew the app.

Parse Servers also, due to its impending closure, have very limited number of supported functions to work on complex apps. The following areas which developers will have to focus more on are due to non-availability parse support are:

Analytics and needs to set up again after the migration, Push notifications and User Authentication.

Author’s Bio:

Ritesh Patil [Twitter] is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech that helps startups and enterprises in mobile technology. He loves technology, especially mobile technology. He’s an avid blogger and writes on mobile application. He works in an application development company.