Platform Updates, September 2014

We're always looking for ways to make it easier for developers to build, grow, and monetize apps with Facebook. Today we're announcing three updates that will make it easier to: find the right product for your needs based on your app's industry; see updates about our developer services and APIs; and make your Parse app remotely configurable through a new Parse Config dashboard.

New industry-focused section on the Facebook Developers site

We noticed that app developers in the same industry have similar needs throughout an app's lifecycle— whether it's to acquire new users, convert dormant users into active users, allow users to spread the word about your app, or to monetize your app. We wanted to provide targeted Facebook solutions to help meet your specific needs.

So today we're launching a new section on the Facebook Developers site that provides industry-specific information and tips for e-commerce, entertainment, games, photos and travel.

Each industry page includes:

• A video of an experienced Partner Manager describing relevant Facebook services and solutions, with a list of resources related to those products
• Case studies highlighting apps that have seen positive results from successfully integrating Facebook products
• Best practices and checklists

Check them out here:

• E-commerce
• Entertainment
• Games
• Photos
• Travel

You can also find the industry pages in the 'Products' tab on the top navigation of the devsite.

Refreshed developer services and APIs status page

We updated the service health dashboard to provide up-to-date information about the health and status of our developer services and APIs. The status page will now display more granular and frequent updates on service issues in a more easily digestible format. Updates will be linked to the task for the issue, and you will be able to follow whether it is resolved or ongoing. Check it out here.

Introducing Parse Config

Parse is excited to launch Parse Config, the simplest way to store your app’s parameters for updating on the fly. Keeping configurations out of your app’s binary means config changes do not require a fresh app release.

Say you have a background image in your game, and you would like to change it on the fly during the Christmas season. All you would have to do is swap the image on the new Parse Config dashboard. Or, for example, you have this shiny new feature that you haven’t released yet, and would like to have a few people dogfood it. You could trickle out these by specifying a “dogfooding” array of user IDs.

Parse Config makes the experience of handling configuration much smoother than ever before. We updated our iOS, Android, JS, .NET and Unity SDKs to provide intuitive method calls to help sync configurations in the Parse Cloud. Our SDKs automatically cache the last-fetched configuration, so you don’t have to re-fetch it after an app restart.