It is very sad that Parse is shutting down. Yes definitely using these kind of platforms gives a problem one day or another. But we should not forget the advantages that these provides us. Parse had various advantages like a ready to go backend for your apps which saves a lot of effort for you. Lets say you are validating your ideas, parse gave us a lot of edge than rolling your our own API, DB, Server stack, push notifications etc. So I have a bit of different thought here, instead of making your apps vendor-independent, make it flexible enough to switch, and switch to our own stack one by one when the time is right.