4 iOS Backend as a Service (BaaS) Providers for Mobile app development

Benny Alexander April 6, 2016 0 comments

With the rapid emergence of technological innovations, there has been a dramatic rise in the demand for high-end technological solutions for web application development. Traditional technologies have taken a backseat, and application developers are constantly looking out for the latest development models.

So what’s new and exciting in the tech landscape?

It has to be BaaS or ‘Backend as a Service’.

What is BaaS?

Also termed as Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS), this particular application development model helps developers in linking their applications to backend cloud storage. By offering increased number of services to your potential clients, BaaS emerges as one of the effective alternatives to conventional application development.

Moreover, with the presence of some popular and leading BaaS service providers in the market; this particular service is gaining solid ground amongst enterprise customers.

Interested to know about 4 leading BaaS service providers for your iOS apps? Then read on…

1. Firebase

The first name in this list is California-based Firebase. As one of the pioneering BaaS companies across the globe, Firebase offers a range of products for software application developers. The company offers static web hosting and real-time database service as part of its BaaS portfolio.

With the help of this service,

1. Application developers can easily synchronize application data across clients.
2. Developers can ensure this data synchronization with the help of an API, which also offers data storage on Firebase’s cloud.
3. A REST API also offers access to the database.

2. Couchbase

Another noteworthy mention is Couchbase, the result of a merger of CouchOne Inc. and Membase Inc. resulted in the formation of Couchbase. The company also offers a document-oriented database offering indexing and querying.

Couchbase comes with a pretty strong benefits set

1. The firm offers highly scalable backend resources and tools.
2. Some of the common services offered by the company are:

• file sharing and storage,
• push notifications,
• social network integration,
• user management,
• chat and messaging functions,
• location services, and
• usage analysis tools

3. io

As a JavaScript library, Socket.io proves to be highly beneficial for real-time web application development projects. By enabling bi-directional and real-time communication between servers and web clients, it proves to be helpful in real-time web applications.

It works actively across platforms and is highly reliable and speedy. With a client-side library for running in browsers and a server-end library for node, it happens to be of paramount significance for both servers and web clients.

4. Parse

With easy-to-understand documentation and helpful BaaS, Parse offers unsurpassed convenience to first-time developers. The company provides beginners with sample projects along with custom UI views. Additionally, the services offered by Parse come equipped with a diverse range of 3rd-party libraries.

Perhaps, the only issue with Parse’s policy is that once you exceed the free allocation limit, the prices scale up quite high.

BaaS is rapidly emerging as the standard of the future in cloud-based data storage. It helps iOS development agencies in promoting their value to clients as a feasible alternative to setting up an expensive in-house team for storage and backup. Do let us know if BaaS will be on your database strategy for 2016-17.