Instagram is one of the most successful startup stories you’ll ever hear about. It took over a year to build such a great product in terms of popularity, usability and money it earned. Quite acceptable. However, as Mike Krieger (co-founder Instagram) likes to put it, “Instagram is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship, but was a product of over a year of work.”. But if you use Parse, a backend service for smartphone apps, Instagram could have been built in just 30 minutes. Now here’s an awkward statement for any founder.
Anypic is a latest open-source alternative released by Parse that replicates Instagram. You can download the source and put together your own version of Instagram. Parse claims that developers have already started tweaking Anypic to create intriguing photo apps. Cool, right?
Just like me, you must be wondering why would someone roll out a replica of a burgeoning service. Well it was not meant that way. The developers of Parse had other intentions in mind while building this app. Anypic commends how flexible and robust Parse(which also serves backend for Anypic) is. The 30-minutes-to-fame is actually complementing the fact that developing smartphone apps with Parse supporting the backend is as easy as pie.
As mentioned at the beginning, Instagram couldn’t have been built with Parse as the latter came along only while Instagram was already a hit. Parse is already serving backend for more than 25,000 apps which includes enterprise apps as well as apps from non-affiliated developers. On a closing note, Anypic is a great product-showcase app that reinforces the ability of Parse.