Appcelerator, the maker of the Titanium mobile app development platform, has acquired Cocoafish in the latest move to expand the functionality of its offering. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cocoafish offers developers 25 cloud-based features they can add to their apps via APIs. These include things such as a status updates engine for users, as well as admin options such as account management, storage and so forth. It’s used by services like photo sharing site Linea, and it’s easy to see why Appcelerator deemed it a good fit for its growing portfolio.

Cocoafish’s code will be promptly integrated into its new owner’s portfolio. It will be plugged into Titanium in Q1 and released into general availability early next quarter, along with a standalone version with usage-based plans.

“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.”

The company says that over 1.5 million developers are using its service today – which seems to correspond with some statistics recently released by the International Data Corporation.  The firm analyzed this particular job market and discovered that demand for user-interface developers stands out along with several other roles, further validating  Appcelerator’s latest investment to some extent.

This marks Appcelerator’s first acquisition since its latest round of funding, and its third acquisition in the past twelve months.  Appcelerator’s on a role, building out its ecosystem to better accomodate the expanding needs of developers that must make their own appeal to multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, and emerging standards like HTML5.

Cocoafish is a particularly good fit for Appcelerator, given their existing goals around offering an extensive marketplace with resources served up to developers “a la mode” style.

“We’ve proven we can take great technology and people and integrate them into our company and ecosystem in a way that benefits everybody,” Haynie says.  “We’re certainly growing very fast organically, but sometimes there’s an opportunity to define great technology and I think that’s the case with all three of our acquisitions.  They’ve been very complimentary, adding something we didn’t have in terms of the team and the technology.”

Contributors: Maria Deutscher