Backend for Crossplatform App - Pointers/Suggestions?

Development Mobile App Development
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I want to develop an app that uses the GoogleMaps API and displays several stores. Each listing has the store's name, address, what it specializes in, and anonymous users can post a review or at least a 1-5 star ranking. While not important now, I may eventually want to implement users authentication/profiles with lists of their favorite stores.

I'd like it to be cross-platform for Android, iOS, web and maybe eventually Windows phones.

My experience with databases/writing backend code is minimal - most of my work has been clientside or had no networking component. I have dabbled with Parse, Ruby on Rails, JSON, SQL, and JavaScript in various college courses, but never anything serious. Parse is seductive right now, as I'm most familiar with it, but I wouldn't mind branching out and learning. Cost-effective scaling is nice.

Anyone have suggestions for a hosting service, APIs, and/or tutorials? I've done some minimal research and Apache CouchDB was suggested to me, but really, I'm not sure of where to start. I need to figure out precisely what I should be studying.

Thanks all!

Edit: Well, turns out Parse is being discontinued, so no go there.

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Yeah, Parse is pretty much dead.

If you like the idea of Parse, take a look at Meteor and Firebase. I haven't used them myself though, but they look nice.

Personally, I've mainly used Azure for hosting some WebAPI's and using it for Notifications and some various storage such as blob and table storage. Works very well.

For developing the apps I use Xamarin, which creates native apps, just in C# instead of their respective native languages. This enables me to share a whole bunch of code. Depending on the project up to 70-80% of code shared between platforms!

If you are a student you can get some free licenses for Xamarin and sign up for Bizspark or one of the student offers from Microsoft for a whole bunch of credits for Azure.

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Firebase is simple and easy to use the DB is done in Json and there is libraries for just about every platform. If you are using Angular 2 i recommend AngularFire2 its what im using in my current development of an app im writing