On January, 28th, Facebook announced the retirement of Parse. Parse was one of the leaders in the “mobile backend as a service” (MBaaS) space. It gave app developers a hosted alternative to building a custom backend from scratch for data storage and some logic around that data. Parse was acquired in 2013 by Facebook for $85 million and was powering 500,000 apps in 2014 according to Wikipedia. So what turned the success story into a failure?