Apple has acquired Canadian start-up buddybuild, a mobile iteration platform focused on building integration and debugging tools for iOS developers, for an undisclosed sum.

"We're excited to share that the buddybuild team has joined the Xcode engineering group at Apple to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community," buddybuild said in a statement on Wednesday

The company said that it would stay in Vancouver -- a hotbed of developer and engineering talent.

"The buddybuild service will remain available to existing customers to build, test and ship iOS apps to testers through buddybuild.com," it added.

The startup is no longer accepting new customers.

"Existing 'Free

 Starter' plans and Android app development will be discontinued on March 1, 2018," the company said. According to TechCrunch, buddybuild would be rolled into Xcode, Apple's suite of development tools for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

Apple still generates significant revenue from apps.

"Of the $17 billion generated in Q3 from apps globally (excluding China), Apple accounted for around $11 billion of it, according to App Annie," the report added.

Buddybuild was founded in 2015 by former Amazon employees Dennis Pilarinos and Christopher Stott.

In 2014, Apple acquired TestFlight which began to require users to employ Xcode to utilise the service.

There were also reports earlier this week of Apple looking to acquire Netflix instead of launching a video subscription product in 2018 to counter Netflix.

In fact, Apple has been on an expansion spree. In December, it acquired music recognition app Shazam for $400 million. Prior to that in November, acquired Vrvana, a startup from Montreal, Canada , which makes  Totem headset, for around $30 million.

Prior to that, it also acquired InVisage Technologies in November as part of its strategy to work on smaller but powerful computing devices. InVisage develops solutions to improve imaging capabilities on space-constrained devices, like smartphones.

With IANS inputs