Nice work and congrats on completing your final assignment! Parse is a great tool for quickly prototyping the backend for many apps. Even if you choose to ultimately replace Parse with a more conventional backend (e.g., Rails, Django, Node.js), that wouldn't really change the iOS code.
At this point, even though we've been building fairly simple iOS apps, we've covered a lot of the core concepts involved in iOS development. A lot of time and code in modern iOS apps is spent putting on the final 10% of polish, which is surprisingly time consuming and technically challenging. Here's a few additional topics that we didn't cover, but you should look into if you want to continue iOS development:
Core Data. This isn't used by Facebook and many other companies, but is still asked about in iOS interviews.
Multithreading. Grand Central Dispatch and NSOperationQueue.
Custom Views. We used custom views via pods, and eventually you'll need to make your own!
Custom Interactive View Controller Transitions. If you're tired of view controllers animating in from the right or from the bottom, then you'll need to implement transitions yourself.
Gesture recognizers. We used a few tap gesture recognizers, and you'll also commonly need to use the pan and pinch gesture recognizers.
Unit and integration testing. Once you're in an actual company (or earlier!), you'll need to start actually testing your code.
Nice work and congrats on completing your final assignment! Parse is a great tool for quickly prototyping the backend for many apps. Even if you choose to ultimately replace Parse with a more conventional backend (e.g., Rails, Django, Node.js), that wouldn't really change the iOS code.
At this point, even though we've been building fairly simple iOS apps, we've covered a lot of the core concepts involved in iOS development. A lot of time and code in modern iOS apps is spent putting on the final 10% of polish, which is surprisingly time consuming and technically challenging. Here's a few additional topics that we didn't cover, but you should look into if you want to continue iOS development: