Parse Launches SDK Support For Apple’s WatchOS 2 And tvOS

It’s been pretty quiet around Facebook’s Parse developer platform this year. The team launched its Internet of Things service in March and open-sourced its SDKs in August, but otherwise, we haven’t heard much about it. It looks like Facebook is putting a bit more emphasis on the service. The company today announced two new SDKs for Parse: Apple’s watchOS 2 and tvOS.

Using the watchOS 2 SDK, developers can now build apps that natively run on Apple’s semi-popular wearable. This new SDK builds on the work Parse did for the first version of watchOS.

In some ways, the tvOS SDK is a bit more interesting. The Parse team notes that its mobile SDKs usually assume that any on-device storage is persistent. tvOS, however, treats every file on its disk as temporary (or as a cache) and the operating system can remove any files that aren’t currently being used by a running app. To still enable support for this platform, the Parse team says it had to rearchitect some of its core architecture to ensure the user’s data remained available on the device.

The Parse team also notes that it integrated the log-in feature of Facebook’s tvOS SDK. It’s quite a hassle to log in to an app on a TV, after all. Using this SDK, users can use their smartphones or a computer to log in to an app on their TV.