Appcelerator acquires Cocoafish for cloud-based mobile

Appcelerator's acquisition of Cocoafish acknowledges the 'near-ubiquity' of cloud-based mobile apps

Enterprise-grade development solution Appcelerator announced Thursday its acquisition of Cocoafish, a mobile app infrastructure provider. Appcelerator plans to incorporate Cocoafish's mobile services into its Titanium plan as early as Q2 2012. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Appcelerator has already developed over 35,000 different mobile applications on its Titanium platform, and so is probably pretty clear as to where its mobile platform development can improve. Cocoafish offers more than 25 popular cloud-based mobile features including push notifications, location, social integration, sharing, user management, and photo manipulation.

Appcelerator will launch Cocoafish as "Appcelerator Cloud Services” (ACS) in early Q2 with integration with its Titanium Platform. ACS will have iOS, Android, REST and JavaScript SDKs compatibility for non-Titanium customers and will be priced on a tiered basis.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Appcelerator has thus far recieved $31.2 million in funding, from investors Larry Augustin, Storm Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and eBay. Cocoafish was founded in 2010 and is based in San Francisco, CA.

This acquisition marks the third in the past year for Appcelerator. The company acquired Aptana in January of 2011, gaining Integrated Development Environment technology in the process. Then in fall 2011, the company acquired Particle Code, gaining HTML5 expertise.

Appcelerator indicated that this acquisition in particular marks a greater movement into cloud-based mobile technology. And this makes sense, as in a recent report, the company found that 84% of its developer base uses cloud-based services in their mobile applications.

“Nearly all of our developers and customers have been manually adding cloud service functionality to their mobile applications since we launched Appcelerator’s Titanium Platform three years ago,”  said Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie, in the company's release.

“Cocoafish is by far the most complete mobile cloud solution, and combined with the Titanium Platform, Appcelerator is delivering everything a developer needs to build rich, connected applications," continued Haynie.

Appcelerator currently works with 1.6 million Web developers. With applications deployed on 40 million devices, Appcelerator's Titanium Platform leverages over 5,000 mobile device and operating system Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create iOS and Android apps, as well as HTML5 mobile web apps.