Hype much? Why would an API ever be platform-specific?
EDIT: Has anybody ever actually used one of this cloud-hosted mobile backend services? Is it really any better than writing/hosting my own backend? Can it move beyond the trivial store-and-retrieve case?
Hey Mizza - I'm one of the engineers that worked on Android support. Until today, our entire push and device registration system was iOS specific. Today it becomes device agnostic. The blog post that janaboruta added goes into detail on what's changed.
To answer your other questions, I can only answer with my opinion. Obviously I've used some mobile backend platforms and I believe that they offer features beyond the trivial store and retrieval case. The obvious and biggest feature that comes to mind is supporting push notifications out of the box.
But there are a few more that at least StackMob provides, such as the ability to version your API out of the box, run multiple versions concurrently, have a sandbox environment in which to develop, have the option to extend the platform with your own code, and have good analytics for your app. We're always adding new features too.
As an Android & iOS developer before I worked at StackMob, I generally had to do some work to implement all of those things. We're aiming to build these things well so that any mobile engineer can use them and focus on building a great app instead of a great backend.
EDIT: Has anybody ever actually used one of this cloud-hosted mobile backend services? Is it really any better than writing/hosting my own backend? Can it move beyond the trivial store-and-retrieve case?