These guys seem to be copying the Parse business model. Which as we all know worked out very nicely for the founders and investors. But very badly for anyone that adopted the Parse framework.
We are very aware of how users of Parse got left in the cold when Facebook dropped the project. That is one of the reasons that we choose to offer Realm, not as a service that can be shut down, but rather as a free download that you can self-host on any provider.
That way, even if something happened to us you would still be able to continue running your apps on your own servers. I know that there could still be concerns about how to maintain the software, which is why we have also open sourced the underlying database.
I think most people will agree that we have a pretty good track record of being part of the ecosystem and being there for the developer community, and we very much intend to stay that way.
Very legitimate concern. I use the Realm database in production and it has proven to be a very good decision. Huge advantage over Parse is that the database is open source. If something did happen, the open source community would probably be enough to carry it. If not, it is just a local persistence store, so not hugely difficult to swap out for something else.
This new mobile platform is not (as far as I can tell) open source and has completely unknown pricing beyond the free tier. I certainly wouldn't go near it, even though it looks great.
Yes and no… I mean it seems like Realm is more focused on an “offline-first” approach by contrast, and is adding this "database-as-a-service platform” for platform agnostic sync.
But, yeah… the usual “what happens if I run into a problem they can’t solve for me [in a timely manner]” or “what if I want to make hard-optimizations” or “what if they break something for me” or “what if they sunset it and I’m building an actual business on top of it” questions apply, of course.
In general, depending on what you’re doing you'd want to MINIMIZE your dependencies on services like this. Luckily, they’ve always seemed focused on database more so than “everything” like Parse was… so it’s only 1 thing, albeit perhaps the most critical one.
I disagree that Parse worked out badly. Now that parse-server is open source, the ecosystem is stronger than ever.
I hesitatingly and begrudgingly used parse while it was still hosted by Facebook. At the time my biggest and only problem with it was the vendor lock-in. Now that it's open source, that problem no longer exists, and all the great tooling is still around.
I'm happily using it on new projects. I suggest taking a look and trying it yourself.
We are very aware of how users of Parse got left in the cold when Facebook dropped the project. That is one of the reasons that we choose to offer Realm, not as a service that can be shut down, but rather as a free download that you can self-host on any provider.
That way, even if something happened to us you would still be able to continue running your apps on your own servers. I know that there could still be concerns about how to maintain the software, which is why we have also open sourced the underlying database.
I think most people will agree that we have a pretty good track record of being part of the ecosystem and being there for the developer community, and we very much intend to stay that way.