[muzani]

They didn't shut down Parse though. You just had to self-host it. But somehow when Big Tech drops support for anything, people just migrate out of it for no reason and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like Flutter careers are completely dead in the water now. One of my businesses has been running on Parse Server for half a decade and there's still updates on Parse. And despite being "dead", I still find Parse easier to code with than Firebase, though Supabase is now the favored option.

[spacebanana7]

Fair point. But only a small minority of back end as a service users are comfortable with self hosting something like Parse.

Enterprises really like having someone to sue when things go wrong. And indie devs who pick BaaS offerings do so in large part to avoid the hassle of self hosting.

[muzani]

A bit off topic, but I wrote a guide to do this on Herok for anyone curious: https://smuzani.medium.com/setting-up-a-mobile-backend-serve...

I'm not sure if it's still valid but it's not too hard, and still much easier to maintain than dealing with AWS. I have basic AWS proficiency, but it's still good to have Heroku to not think about it.

[windowshopping]

Why are flutter careers dead?

[muzani]

Google laid off the Flutter team. They still seem to be releasing Flutter announcements but it's slow.

One big part of Flutter was that it was a hedge against Java lawsuits back in the day. The other was that it was experimenting with some mobile code, like designing it around lifecycles and all the async UI. But now the same paradigms have been adopted by iOS and Android.

Unlike BE, mobile moves quite quickly too; the last few years have been deprecating a lot of things like push notification security and file access. Mostly to deal with dark patterns. So a platform that isn't in active maintenance tends to fall apart quickly like we've seen with many mobile libraries, Cordova, etc.