That's silly. Seeing as how I had to google PKI to see what it was, I doubt I'd be able to build a Parse-like service in one afternoon. Parse may not be strictly necessary, but it's a fantastically easy and cheap way for iOS (and Android and front-end and Windows Phone) developers to get their backend up and running.
> Seeing as how I had to google PKI to see what it was, I doubt I'd be able to build a Parse-like service in one afternoon.
Then it's something you would learn, and those several afternoons would mean that you'd be well equipped to tackle a similar problem in an afternoon later.
Basic x509 certificates and PKI is really something an iOS developer (or any developer, really) should be able handle. Understanding this stuff is pretty central to just about all secure communications we have between clients/servers anywhere. It's not like you have to reimplement a crypto library; you just need to know the basics of how they work.
I actually did build all of my company's push stuff for iOS in an afternoon. It's a very simple TCP protocol that's well documented. If you know anything about basic networking it's cake.
It actually is very easy, we have a tiny pushserver written in Python that was written in a day or something like that. It's been running for almost a year without a restart, so it didn't even need further development.
