• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 5, 2016

So much for living on under Google's big umbrella.

About a year after selling out to the search giant, mobile app prototyping startup Pixate plans to shut down.

“When we launched Pixate … our mission was to give designers the much-needed ability to create and experiment with complex animated interfaces,” the startup’s management team notes in a new blog post. “We joined Google just over a year ago to continue our mission and to pursue a broader vision of changing the way products were designed and built.”

Why the change?

“While a lot of the ideas we’ve been developing could work inside the Pixate framework, we believe we can have a larger impact if we move beyond its scope,” according to the team. “To allow us to focus on our broader vision, we will be to saying goodbye to Pixate.”

More broadly, Google’s cloud and app businesses remain a work in progress.

The search giant literally just rechristened its cloud-based services as Google Cloud and combined its cloud services under the Google Cloud umbrella, including the company’s Google Apps for Work suite, machine-learning tools, APIs and Google’s product collection of Android devices and Chromebooks.

Google also renamed its Google Apps for Work product -- a suite of cloud collaboration and productivity tools -- as the G Suite. Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, Sheets, Calendar and Hangouts will all now fall under the G Suite moniker.

Prior to join Google, Pixate experimented with several service tiers, all of which revolved around app prototyping.