Apple Acquires SwiftUI Prototyping App Play in Quiet Deal

Apple’s purchase of Play, the SwiftUI prototyping app from Rabbit 3 Times, surfaced through a European Commission notification rather than any announcement from Apple itself. The company disclosed the deal to the commission in February, and the details became public only after a standard four-month waiting period. That kind of quiet disclosure is increasingly how Apple handles smaller acquisitions.

Play earned genuine affection from the design community by letting people build interactive prototypes directly on Mac and iPhone using SwiftUI frameworks, then push that work straight into Xcode. It won a design award for innovation in 2025, and the company itself described the tool as a sophisticated but accessible way for teams to sync their designs in real time. That combination of SwiftUI integration and cross-device workflow is exactly what Apple has been trying to push developers toward for years.

The app has already disappeared from the App Store, which is the clearest signal of what this deal actually is: an acqui-hire. Apple gets the team and the intellectual property, and the product quietly exits.

What happens to Xcode

The more interesting thread here is what Rabbit 3 Times built and where it ends up. A tool that lets designers prototype directly in SwiftUI and hand off to Xcode with minimal friction solves a real problem in Apple’s developer ecosystem, one that has never had a first-party answer. Folding that capability into Xcode would close a gap that third-party tools like Figma have occupied for years.

Apple has not said anything publicly about its plans for the team or the technology. Given that antitrust scrutiny around App Store rules continues to expand across multiple jurisdictions, Apple deepening its own developer toolchain rather than relying on outside apps carries its own strategic logic. Whether that logic benefits the broader developer community or mostly tightens Apple’s grip on its own platform is a separate question.