Are there any shortcuts?

No there are not! Just kidding. There are some services and methodologies that are worthwhile to investigate. They could save you a lot of time and money. Think of an app that needs to communicate with a backend because it needs to support chat functionality, or to support the sharing of texts, pictures, audio, or video with other users. Such an app will have a lot of requirements, such as:

• Synchronizing data from the app to the backend
• Getting data from the backend to the app
• Data storage
• Data streaming
• Offline support
• Registration and login through email
• Registration and login with Facebook or Twitter

You probably can build the backend that supports all this yourself, but that is a lot of work and there is no need for that. There are many services available that will take care of all (or some) of the earlier mentioned requirements:

In Chapter 8, Cloud Solutions for App Experiments, we will have a closer look on Parse server. Later, we will also have a look at Windows Azure...