Parse Releases Software Development Kits for Apple Watch, Apple TV

Facebook’s Parse announced Monday the launch of software development kits (SDKs) for Apple Watch and Apple TV, allowing developers to create apps for these platforms.

The Parse SDKs for Apple’s tvOS and watchOS 2 puts the power of Parse in developers’ hands for the Apple TV and Apple Watch. Parse wanted to make it easier to create native experiences for the two channels.

Parse also announced some key milestones:

• More than 600,000 developers have built apps with Parse.
• There are more than 800 million user-app pairs for apps built on Parse.
• Parse serves an average of 2 billion API calls per day.
• Parse apps send more than 27 billion push notifications every month.

Facebook mobile software engineer Nikita Lutsenko blogged about the challenges the Parse team faced with building these new releases:

One of the biggest challenges that we faced with tvOS was local data storage. Before, in our mobile SDKs, we were treating on-device storage as persistent, meaning it won’t be purged by the system. This local storage was used for things like current users’ sessions, as well as current app installation information. On tvOS, however, every file on disk should be treated as a cache or as a temporary storage and could be removed by the system if the app is not running. To utilize the platform at its best and to benefit from existing functionality in our iOS and OS X SDKs, we re-architected one of the core components of local data persistence in a way that still is native to tvOS, but could be used to persist your users’ data locally.

One of the most exciting aspects of this project was the development process itself. Throughout it all, the open source community was instrumental in providing the Parse team with early end-toend testing and valuable feedback, which resulted in an incredibly rapid release. You can read more about our efforts of open sourcing our SDKs here.

We are excited to bring the Parse SDK to more platforms than ever, and especially to see what you build for the big screen with Apple TV and for the Apple Watch!

Readers: What are your favorite Apple Watch apps so far?