&gt; <i>Building on top of google is hard for this reason, and Facebook is beginning to look eerily similar.</i><p>The danger is using something closed-source and proprietary. Most of the popular products&#x2F;services released by Google and Facebook are open-source, at least.<p>Even in this case, Parse provided open-source tools that will keep legacy code running with minimal changes. I think it&#x27;s about the best-case scenario you could ask for when a closed-source platform is shut down.