If you have not been paying attention, Parse has been working tirelessly on open-sourcing their development stack. The project drew a lot of support within the community, and has grown now to include necessary features like push notifications, and a dashboard system. It has also matured as a technology, inviting many host providers to support this new development stack.
At Guaraná, we have developing mobile apps using the Parse platform since 2013. Our team has been developing expertise in the technology on both Android & iOS platforms. While the service shutdown announcement has left us with very mixed feelings, we are convinced that Parse server & co. will thrive within the open source community. And we want to do our part!
Today, we are releasing a library that we have been using internally in our iOS projects: GRNPFObject. This is a drop-in subclass that you can use to deal with the way Parse handles nils. Have a look at the README for more information, or take a look at our other open-source projects. And yes, there are more of them on the way!