To address the "moving off of Parse" comment: The way I've dealt with this is to use the Parse REST Client instead of the Parse SDK. That way you're object model isn't tied to parse PFObjects and you can swap out the Networking layer if you choose to move to another vendor. If you control the full stack, you can even model your backend to more-or-less mimic Parse's Rest API.
Yeah in retrospect we should have definitely done this. Although it causes a significant trade off to prototyping speed. I am not sure if its not just worth using your own API at that point.
