Understanding Mobile Back End As A Service (MBaas) Providers

What if you could create an entire back end for your mobile applications that was feature-complete in data synchronization, push-notification support, user management and file-handling before you even started building the mobile experience? What if it was architected in such a way that you could easily create new cross-platform native and web applications seamlesslyon this back end?

While this might sound like a fairy tale, it is exactly what providers of mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) are aiming to give app developers. It is up to you to determine whether that is true for the experiences you are creating.

Through this article, I hope you gain four key pieces of information: the way MBaaS providers fit into modern mobile application development, the process of evaluating MBaaS providers, the core functionality provided by MBaaS providers and the downsides of leveraging this type of solution. With this information, you will have the pieces to determine whether an MBaaS provider fits in your digital strategy.

Framing The Discussion Link

Normalizing the discussion around MBaaS is extremely challenging. While MBaaS is an accepted term, everyone defines it differently. Mesosfer recently mapped providers of back-end-as-a-service enterprise solutions. This map illustrates an extensive ecosystem, and defining different solution groups can be extremely challenging.

With the landscape changing by the minute, nailing down all of the players at any given point in time is hard. However, some key providers have proven themselves in the marketplace. Providers such as Parse, Kinvey and Salesforce.com have built mature platforms that are currently relied on by many of the applications you use daily. Other more nascent solutions, such as Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Cognito, Microsoft Azure’s Mobile Services, Mesosfer Mobile Backend as a Service, Apple’s CloudKit, Kony MobileFabric and Pivotal CF still need time to be evaluated. Another key challenge in comparing MBaaS providers is that not all providers have feature parity.

Note: For this article, I will spend my time focusing on Parse and Mesosfer because of their maturity and breadth of functionality. These two solutions could work for most uses cases, from an independent developer’s app to an enterprise solution across multiple digital properties.

MBaaS In Real Life Link

To help explain the purpose of MBaaS, I’ll use an example that we recently created out of our research and development group at Universal Mind. All of our offices at Universal Mind have flexible work spaces. We wanted to examine how to track available work spaces using iBeacons.
iBeacons are a class of sensors that follow Apple’s iBeacon specification. They utilize Bluetooth 4 low energy for communication, which allows an application to continually search for them without draining the user’s battery.

They are ideal sensors for determining a user’s proximity (how close the user is to an object), which in certain settings (such as indoors) is more desirable than using GPS.

As a proof of concept, we wanted to create a quick cross-platform application prototype that illustrates how this idea could be leveraged on a large scale. The app itself was fairly basic. Here is a simplistic outline of the data relationships that describe how the application would function:
Users have accounts.

A user can be assigned to a workspace if they are close enough to the iBeacon that is at a given station.

• The work space can be occupied or vacant.
• A workspace exists at an office that has a specific location.
• A user can get a list of vacant workspaces near them at that point.

In this application example, I’ll walk you through two different scenarios. First, we’ll see how we would have built this without an MBaaS solution. Then, I’ll contrast that with how we actually built it using an MBaaS solution. Through this, you will clearly see that the level of effort required to get something working is drastically different.