Apple has acquired the Canadian app development firm Buddybuild  for an undisclosed sum.

On its website, the company describes itself as: “a continuous integration, continuous deployment, and user feedback platform for development teams.” In essence, Buddybuild’s tools enable developers to build apps through GitHub, BitBucket and GitLab.

Buddybuild confirmed the acquisition in a blog post, in which it also confirmed that the buddybuild team would join Apple’s Xcode engineering group “to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community.”

The post also confirmed that the firm would remain in Vancouver, which it described as “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 the company’s website, but new customers are no longer being accepted. Existing Free Starter plans will be discontinued on 1 March 2018, and, perhaps not surprisingly, Android app development will cease on the same date.

Buddybuild was founded in 2015 by ex-Amazon employees Dennis Pilarinos and Christopher Stott. Since then, it has raised just short of $9m (£6.6m) in funding.