Following the example of Microsoft Corp. and other top rivals, Google is stepping up its efforts to court the developer community. Anonymous sources told VentureBeat yesterday that the search giant had secretly bought a startup called Apportable Inc. as part of this push sometime last year.

The tipsters further claim that the transaction was an acquihire, which would seem to indicate that Google wasn’t particularly interested in the startup’s flagship mobile development toolkit. But while the software may not end up being put to use by the search giant, it does provide some potential clues as to what the Apportable team is working on now.

The most notable component of the startup’s lineup was a service called Tengu that made it possible to port iOS apps to Android without having to rewrite them from scratch. Instead, users could simply cross-compile their Swift code into a format that is natively supported by Google’s operating system. Apportable offered the tool alongside an open-source game development framework that is still up on GitHub today and an enterprise offering geared towards large, cross-platform application projects. The startup’s experience with supporting such initiatives could go a long way towards helping Google target the corporate crowd and attract developers who focus exclusively on iOS due to the difficulty of supporting multiple operating systems.

However, VentureBeat’s sources noted that the search giant did not absorb the entire Apportable team following the acquisition. A small number of developers were left behind to fulfill technical support obligations towards users of its enterprise offerings, while most of the startup’s remaining workers were laid off. Only about 11 staffers ended up joining the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary along with co-founders Collin Jackson and Ian Fischer, who now have engineering  roles.

The group will likely find itself working alongside recruits from the other startups that Google has bought in recent years as part of its mobile efforts. The search giant absorbed app development automation provider LaunchKit Inc. just last month and picked up Firebase Inc. in late 2014 to get hold of its database technology.. Due to their relatively small value, Google hasn’t shared financial details about any of the deals.

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