In a Friday announcement marking the fifth takeover by Google this year, the Internet search giant revealed that it has acquired software developer Sparrow, the startup behind the well-liked Mac and iOS e-mail clients of the same time.

According to a Macworld report, citing information shared by a Google spokesperson, Google's Sparrow acquisition - the financial terms of which remained undisclosed - will bring aboard the Sparrow staff to the Gmail team, for working on new projects.

The Google spokesperson noted that that the centre of the Sparrow team's focus has chiefly been the users of the Sparrow email client for iOS and OS X, and it has always worked at building a seamlessly simple and intuitive interface for their email client.

As such, it is evident that the Sparrow acquisition brings along engineering talent which will surely be of great use to Google --- more so as the Sparrow co-founder and CTO Hoa Dinh Viet has worked with Apple as well as Amazon, on products like Apple's iCal and iSync and Amazon's Kindle e-reader respectively.

With Sparrow having revealed a few months back that it was also working on a yet-to-be-released iPad version of its Sparrow app, the startup's CEO Dom Leca said in an official blog post that Sparrow is "joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision -- one that we think we can better achieve with Google."