Facebook is shuttering Parse, the app development platform it bought for a reported $85m (£59m) in 2013.

Parse provided tools for cross-platform app development, used by over 600,000 developers. Since its acquistion, Facebook made several additions to the service, including deeplinking, push notification and support for IoT devices and wearables, so the announcement comes as something of a surprise.

The company will wind down operations over the next year and be officially retired on 28 January 2017. In the meantime, its offering clients a database migration tool, and is also making Parse Server available in open source to run most features of its API from a Node.js server.

“We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible,” said Parse co-founder Kevin Lacker. “We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.