Last Thursday was the anniversary of Facebook’s acquisition of Parse – a much-loved platform to develop apps across devices. DeveloperTech caught up with Julien Codorniou, Director of Partnerships at Facebook, to see how their relationship is going.

In the interview we are treated to the first numbers in which we can help gauge how successful the high-profile buy has been. As well as what the acquisition process is like from a company which consistently makes headline-worthy purchases…

DT: What has the uptake of Parse been like since the acquisition?

JC: When we bought the company a year ago we had 100,000 active apps on Parse. We have seen amazing growth and acceleration of the product – especially in Europe. We now have 240,000 active apps running on Parse.

That’s a number we are pretty excited about.

We’re going to keep investing into the Parse ecosystem. The mission for Parse is to be the first platform developers think about when they start building mobile apps.

DT: How is Parse helping developers to build applications?

JC: Parse provides what every mobile developer needs; analytics, database, storage, push notifications… and it also removes a lot of friction that you can meet when you want to build apps on multiple platforms.

By using Parse you can just spend your time, your talent, and your energy on the client – not the back-end server issues that developers don’t like to do.

We are very happy to see big companies in the mobile world such as Deezer or Dailymotion start using Parse recently. We’re seeing real acceleration. We’ll announce more names next week at F8 [Facebook’s annual developer conference].

DT: How has Facebook’s partnership helped achieve the huge growth Parse is seeing?

JC: When you look at people who started building apps on Parse, you will see two categories;

Startups, who are building apps for the first time, and they’ve heard about Parse through the Facebook acquisition. They have people to talk to now…

… And the existing Facebook ecosystem, which is a huge gaming-centric ecosystem who decided to jump on Parse after the acquisition because they like Facebook, and they want Facebook to be that one-stop shop for mobile developers.

You can come to Facebook for building an application with Parse; then grow the application with the platform using ‘Open Graph’ sharing and the mobile app ads – which have both been very successful.

DT: The European app economy is expected to be worth over £50bn by 2018, but Facebook is doing a lot of work to bring access to the social network to developing countries. Do you see development, possibly using Parse, as being one of the main drivers to boost these economies?

JC: We believe by making it easy and cheap as possible for developers to build apps – that then creates an app economy in countries where you don’t have one. Most of the entrepreneurs that we talk to in Europe are mobile-only, or mobile-first, like we are.

By bringing something which brings real value, at the cheapest possible price, we can help developers to build apps and why not make a living out of it?

We’ve seen amazing use of Parse in Ukraine, in Russia, in Israel, in Poland… So we know that since it’s a very self-service product it attracts a lot of start-ups, and the licensing is pretty aggressive.

DT: It’s interesting you mentioned Russia because the country’s biggest social network is VK. Do you have many Russian developers?

JC: We do actually. We started investing in Russia 18 months ago when we went there with Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook CEO] to talk to developers. VK is great, it will make you the king of Russia, but on Facebook you can get global distribution.

At that point we had almost 250 million monthly gamers so what happened in the last two years is we’ve seen a tsunami of Russian developers and apps coming from VK to Facebook.

We’re very pleased with the progress of the platform there.

DT: When Facebook acquires a company is the talent generally used to better Facebook? Or does the company tend to continue almost like “life as usual” as a sub-company?

JC: It depends on the company. Instagram is acting as an independent company, but Parse was obviously integrated into Facebook and that’s the first pillar of our platform strategy. The founder of Parse has bigger responsibility at Facebook and will actually be on-stage next week at F8.

Sometimes it’s product acquisitions like Parse, sometimes it’s talent acquisitions, and sometimes it’s “new world” acquisitions like Instagram or WhatsApp. Parse was a product and talent acquisition – if you talk to anybody at Facebook on the platform team everybody would talk about Parse.

DT: One of the highest-profile Facebook acquisitions recently was that of Oculus. Do you see development on eyewear and virtual reality headsets as the next big thing? What does it mean for Facebook?

JC: We can’t really talk about it yet as the acquisition hasn’t been closed – but this is basically a bet on the next competing platform. We hope it will drive a lot of interest from developers, and gaming developers first.

What do you think about Parse and Facebook’s acquisitions? Let us know in the comments.