Facebook’s Parse now lets your apps work offline

SAN FRANCISCO — At Facebook’s f8 developer conference, Parse had some big announcements: a handful of pretty useful new features, new service plans, and — oh, yeah — the capability to build apps that work offline.

As Parse chief Ilya Sukhar said onstage today, many users are offline by default. And if your app only works with an Internet connection, you’re missing out on those people — and any revenue they generate for you.

Parse is a mobile service for developers. It provides app analytics, push notification services, and Parse Core, a cloud-based product with features for data storage, social logins, etc. Facebook acquired Parse almost exactly one year ago.

Parse is launching an offline data store, which will enable Parse apps to function while the end user isn’t connected to any networks.

Today, the service has added growth dashboard. “It tells you how you’re doing — are people coming in the door?” said Sukhar. There’s also a handy retention graph feature.

“We came in the door with 60,000 apps,” said Sukhar. Today, he said, Parse supports 260,000 apps and has added 140,000 devs this year.

Also today, Sukahr said, devs can get unlimited Parse Core service for up to 30 requests per second, unlimited push notifications for up to a million recipients, and unlimited data points for its analytics services.