Apple Acquires Play, the SwiftUI Prototyping Tool It Honored a Year Ago

Apple has acquired Play, the SwiftUI prototyping app it named a winner at last year's Apple Design Awards, according to a regulatory filing made public this week.

The deal was disclosed through a notification Apple submitted to the European Commission, which publishes qualifying acquisitions under the EU's Digital Markets Act.

Apple filed the notification in February, and it became public this week after a standard four month waiting period.

What Play did

Play was a free Mac and iPhone app from a New York company called Rabbit 3 Times, founded in 2021 and incorporated in Delaware. The tool let designers build interactive interfaces directly on their devices using Apple's SwiftUI frameworks, then export the work to Xcode to continue development.

The app sat somewhere between Shortcuts and Xcode, giving designers a way to mock up a concept and see it running in real time, with projects synced across Mac and iPhone. Building prototypes was free. Exporting them to Xcode was offered through a paid service.

In June 2025, Play won an Apple Design Award in the Innovation category.

Apple wrote at the time, describing an interface that was "both powerful and easy to navigate."

An acquihire, not a product purchase

The filing describes a deal in which Apple acquires certain assets from Rabbit 3 Times and gains the right to offer employment to certain staff. That structure points to an acquihire, where the buyer is primarily after a company's people and intellectual property rather than its shipping product.

Play has already been pulled from the App Store. Rabbit 3 Times said earlier this year that it would stop supporting the iPhone and Mac apps starting April 20, and it made the previously paid Xcode export service free "to help with the transition."

The company's website has since been taken down. Its parting message read, "We're working on something new," alongside the line, "It has been an incredible journey."

Part of a developer tools push

The purchase follows Apple's recent acquisition of the open source Swift Package Index, a widely used developer resource that Apple said would continue in its current form. Taken together, the two deals suggest Apple is investing in the tools and people around its Swift and SwiftUI ecosystem.

What Apple plans to do with Play is not yet clear. The company could fold the technology into Xcode, relaunch it as a standalone tool, or add its capabilities to Apple's free developer resources over time. Apple has not commented on its plans.