Apple Acquires Play, SwiftUI Prototyping Tool, After Design Award
What You Need to Know
- Apple acquired Rabbit 3 Times, maker of Play, a SwiftUI prototyping app for Mac and iPhone.
- Play was removed from App Store after acquisition, indicating this was primarily an acqui-hire deal.
- Apple awarded Play a Design Award for innovation months after completing the acquisition in February.
- Play’s features like real-time device sync and SwiftUI prototyping will likely integrate into Xcode’s design tools.
Apple quietly acquired assets and hiring rights from Rabbit 3 Times, the company behind Play, a Mac and iPhone app that let designers build interactive SwiftUI prototypes and push them directly to Xcode. The deal was filed with the European Commission in February, but the notification only became public this week after a four-month waiting period, which explains why the acquisition went largely unnoticed until now.
Play was not an obscure tool. Earlier this year, Apple gave it a Design Award for innovation, citing its ability to let designers build interactive prototypes using SwiftUI frameworks, sync work across Mac and iPhone in real time, and collaborate without leaving the Apple ecosystem. The award makes the acquisition read a little differently in hindsight: Apple was effectively evaluating the product on a public stage months after the deal was already done.
The app is no longer available in the App Store, which is the clearest signal that this was a true acqui-hire rather than a strategic investment. Rabbit 3 Times appears to have wound down its consumer-facing product as part of the arrangement.
What Apple Might Do With It
Xcode is the obvious destination for whatever intellectual property came with the deal. Apple’s own description of Play emphasized features that Xcode’s interface design tooling has historically lacked: accessible prototyping, real-time sync between devices, and a workflow built around SwiftUI from the start rather than bolted onto an older interface builder. Whether those capabilities get folded into Xcode directly or inform some separate tool is not yet clear.
Apple has a long history of acquiring small developer tools companies and absorbing their technology into its own platforms, sometimes visibly and sometimes not. Given that Play won its Design Award specifically for innovation within Apple’s own frameworks, the talent and IP here seem like a natural fit for the Xcode team, even if the timeline for any resulting product remains entirely open.
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