Facebook's Parse service broadens its IoT support for Atmel, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Broadcom hardware

Sep 8, 2015 00:19 GMT  ·  By

Parse, the small company that Facebook bought in 2013, has announced it will be expanding its IoT support with the release of four new SDKs (Software Development Kits).

Back in 2013, Facebook surprised everybody by buying Parse, a small Silicon Valley startup that offered a mobile-backend-as-a-service (MBaaS), providing cloud-based tools for building backends for mobile applications.

Facebook paid $85 million / €76 million for Parse, and after the acquisition had concluded, it allowed the company to function as its own entity.

Facebook's is expanding into the Internet of Things

As its offering grew, and the company slowly expanded under's Facebook tutelage, Parse slowly started to dip its finger in the IoT pool, announcing an SDK for the Arduino Yún microcontroller board at this year's F8 developer conference.

As feedback from developers has been more than great, the Parse team has now announced a new set of SDKs, aimed at supporting hardware made by Atmel, Broadcom, Intel, and Texas Instruments.

To be more specific, besides the Arduino Yún, Arduino Zero, and Raspberry Pi platforms, Parse now also supports TI CC3200, Atmel SAM D21, Broadcom WICED, Intel Galileo, Intel Edison, and Intel Minnowboard Max.

Developing companion apps for IoT applications just got a lot easier

What this means is that developers can build IoT applications that run on these hardware platforms, and then, using the Parse SDKs, they can easily interconnect them with a mobile backend running on Parse's infrastructure.

This cuts down the time needed to create a mobile companion app for an IoT smart device, by leveraging the simplicity and automated tools already put in place by Facebook's Parse team.

Facebook delving into mobile-backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) should be of no surprise because the company does not have its own smartphone OS like Apple or Google, but the IoT makes even more sense, especially since the company is actively looking to expand its reach to more users by any means (see Internet.org initiative).