Devs have built 500K apps on Facebook’s Parse, with Asia seeing 90% growth in first half of 2014

While cloud providers fall over themselves to entice customers with price cuts and geographical expansion, Facebook’s Parse division has been focusing exclusively on tools for mobile app developers, and the work appears to be paying off.

Parse today disclosed that 500,000 apps have been built on top of Parse, which provides a mobile backend for building and running applications, mobile app analytics, and a push notification tool.

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In Asia in particular, Parse is picking up adoption, according to stats in a blog post today from Parse founder Ilya Sukhar.

Active apps in Asia grew nearly 90% in the first half of 2014.
Apps in APAC that use all three Parse products — Parse Core, Parse Push, and Parse Analytics — grew by more than 90% in the first half of 2014.
6 of Parse’s 15 largest countries (by number of active apps) are in Asia: India, Japan, Australia, China, Taiwan, Korea.

Parse has also made it easier to get local developers up and running.

“We have localized our technical documentation and customer success stories into Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Japanese, Korean and Russian,” Sukhar wrote.

The context here is that Microsoft has pushed Azure Mobile Services on its burgeoning public cloud, and cloud market leader Amazon Web Services announced a competitive feature earlier this year. Google is also broadening its public cloud capabilities.

But the emphasis on Asia is interesting, as Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has been committing more resources to its public cloud services. Alibaba doesn’t have a dedicated mobile backend as a service, but that could change, given that the company has been adding services that Amazon has offered for years.

As for Parse, this year it has announced several new features, including Push Experiments and offline access.