It took Instagram a good amount of time to build a mobile photo-sharing app that could scale to 50 million users — and its efforts were obviously recognized by others when it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion earlier this year. But Parse, the startup that launched out of Y Combinator last summer and provides backend-as-a-service tools for mobile app developers, says that making such services should not take so much time and money anymore, because Parse’s tools make it much easier and faster to build really scalable mobile apps.
So they put Anypic out there to prove it.
According to the people at Parse, they put Anypic together in 30 minutes. The app, which is available now on the web and in the Apple App Store, purportedly works just like Instagram. The company is open-sourcing all parts of the app along with a tutorial of how it was built. Developers have already forked Anypic and built some interesting photo-sharing related things, Parse tells me.
To be clear, Anypic meant to be a proof-of-concept for how helpful and solid Parse’s tools are, not an app that will unseat Instagram. But it’s still pretty cool.
Parse’s co-founder and CEO Tikhon Bernstam stopped by the TechCrunch TV studio to give us a demo of Anypic and talk a bit about the latest progress at Parse, which now has 25,000 apps on its platform, ranging from apps made by indie developers as well as those from full-on companies such as Hipmunk and Exec. You can watch our chat and Anypic in action in the video embedded below: