The second one is more relevant than you might think. A while ago Parse announced they were going to discontinue their services. That announcement made a lot of (independent) developers pretty angry. These developers were totally dependent on Parse services. The discontinuation of Parse made them fearful because they thought they had no other choice but to end their business. Developers had high expectations from the services, also because Parse had been acquired by Facebook. It seemed to be very solid. Apparently, that acquisition perhaps also led to that same announcement. For Facebook, the team was probably more interesting than the service itself.
Fortunately, this fairy tale has a happy end. Parse came with a nice migration plan, which nowadays is known as the open source solution Parse server. You can host it yourself but if you do not want to do that...