Appcelerator, the leading mobile platform company, announced today that it has acquired Cocoafish, a mobile app infrastructure provider. Cocoafish offers a robust set of more than 25 popular cloud-based mobile features for deep user engagement, including push notifications, location, social integration, sharing, user management, and photo manipulation. Appcelerator plans to integrate the Cocoafish services into its Titanium Platform by early Q2, 2012.

The Cocoafish acquisition is the third in the past year for Appcelerator, having added enterprise-grade IDE capabilities through its acquisition of Aptana last January and HTML5 expertise through its Particle Code acquisition last fall. Based in San Francisco, Cocoafish was founded in 2010 by Michael Goff and Wei Kong.

This latest acquisition marks Appcelerator’s entry into the broader mobile market. The company will offer iOS, Android, JavaScript and REST SDKs, ensuring its mobile cloud solution is accessible to any native and mobile web developer. As a result, app publishers using Objective-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha and HTML5 technologies will be able to create and configure an instantly scalable server-side backend, add network features to apps without writing server code, and deploy their backend web app with the simple push of a button.

Making Mobile Cloud Ubiquity a Reality

In its latest Appcelerator/IDC Mobile Developer Report, the company found that 84% of its developer base use cloud services in their mobile applications. “The approaching near-ubiquitous use of software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and public/private cloud services in today’s mobile applications makes the mobile cloud combination one of the single most important trends in computing today,” noted Scott Ellison, VP of Consumer Mobility at IDC.

“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,” explained Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “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.”

Ensuring Timely Development of Cloud Services

With over 35,000 mobile applications developed on the Titanium Platform, Appcelerator has seen firsthand how challenging it is for mobile developers to quickly build the backend infrastructure and services required for full-featured mobile applications. For example, sourcing a solution for push notifications or setting up a cloud storage system can double the time required to build a mobile app. As a result, customers often cut desired cloud-based features from their applications because they lack the time or expertise to get a solution in place. This is a problem for all mobile app developers as the pressure to get to market in today’s fast-paced mobile industry takes priority.

Titanium and Cocoafish: Integrated Client and Cloud Mobile Platform

Adding Cocoafish to any mobile application is simple due to its easy-to-use APIs, pre-defined objects, and simple backend setup. For Titanium customers it is even easier as Cocoafish’s JavaScript APIs will be integrated into Titanium Studio, providing a complete environment for both frontend and backend development. This integration is a natural extension for any of Appcelerator’s 1.6 million web developers, who already use a JavaScript API to build native iOS, Android, and HTML5 mobile apps.

Cocoafish’s cloud services include many of the most popular features used in today’s top apps, including:
• User management
• Photo manipulation and storage
• Places (rich location storage)
• Social integration
• Custom data objects
• Push notifications
• Storage
• Check-ins
• Status updates
• Chat
• Friend connections
• Ratings and reviews
• Discussion forums
• Event planning
• Messaging

Customers of mobile app Linea have shared more than 50,000 photos in under two months using Cocoafish mobile services. Linea provides a beautiful photo sharing experience for iPad, iPhone, Android, web, and the desktop. “Cocoafish has helped us scale in record time our single platform project to a multi-platform product quickly and easily,” stated Rowland Hobbs, Managing Partner of Post + Beam, the development and design agency for Linea. “We couldn’t have it without their simple instructions and seamless pre-defined implementation. They’ve truly made it a pain-free backend platform for all our development needs.”

Pricing and Availability

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