[Skroob]

Personally, I like that I can spin up a backend for a project without needing to worry about knowing PHP/Rails/Django/MySQL/PostgreSQL/etc. It just makes it that much easier to get a minimum product out the door. If the day comes when I need to migrate that product to something homegrown, I can do that, but it's a lot easier to start with Parse for now.

As for learning its platform, there isn't much to learn, really. If you're familiar with iOS development (or Android), it's dead simple. I learned like 90% of it in an hour or two, reading through the quickstart guide and the docs.