If you use any kind of analytics in your mobile app, you just might use Parse. It’s one of the most popular mobile analytics platforms on the market, and the team behind it have announced some new tools that will make it even better.
During its first annual Parse Developers Day, the company revealed five new tools that it has been developing over the past few months with its new owners at Facebook. There’s a little something for everyone here, including new analytics tools and even support for one of the fastest growing game engines available.
The major release of the day is a new analytics tool called Custom Analytics. As the name implies, it will allow app developers to “track arbitrary events with an arbitrary set of dimensions.” The new tool joins the previously released Push Analytics and API requests tools that tracked user interactions with push notifications and the number of API requests going through Parse. You can find out more about Parse Analytics here.
The other big release is the Parse SDK for Unity. For those unaware, Unity is one of the fastest-growing game engines that supports everything from game consoles and PC to mobile devices. Parse is solely interested in mobile devices, and the new SDK will allow developers to integrate its analytics platform into their Unity powered games. If you need help in setting it up, check out the documentation.
Aside from Analytics, Parse also runs a service called Cloud Code that allows developers to run app code from Parse’s servers instead of their own. During the conference, Parse announced that two new Cloud Modules – Parse Image Cloud Module and Parse User Session Module – are now available in Cloud Code. You can check ’em out here.
Finally, Parse announced a new tool called Background Jobs that takes care of any recurring jobs that your app needs to accomplish. The tool can be set to accomplish these jobs at any time interval via the dashboard. You can read up on the new tool here.
With these new tools, Parse is on track to becoming one of the most widely used mobile analytics platforms on the planet. It might be able to reach that point sooner rather than later if Facebook continues pushing the platform as strong as it has been.
[Image: Parse Analytics]
