Apple has acquired Play, the SwiftUI prototyping app developed by Rabbit 3 Times, Inc., just months after the app took home the 2025 Apple Design Award for Innovation. The deal came to light through a European Commission disclosure required under the Digital Markets Act, and the app has since disappeared from the App Store.
As spotted by MacRumors, the acquisition was filed with the EU Commission in February, but the notification was only published on the Commission’s public webpage this week following a mandatory four-month waiting period. Under the Digital Markets Act, Apple is required to disclose acquisitions of this kind to European regulators, which is the only reason the deal became public at all. MacRumors spotted the listing first.
According to the filing, Apple “will acquire certain assets from and have the right to offer employment to and hire certain employees of Rabbit 3 Times, Inc. d/b/a Play.” That structure, assets plus talent, points to a classic acqui-hire arrangement, suggesting Apple was as interested in the team behind Play as in the technology itself.
Play was a Mac and iPhone app that let designers build interactive prototypes using Apple’s SwiftUI frameworks and then send them directly to Xcode for use in finished, shippable apps. Everything created in Play, including logic and interactions, translated cleanly into Xcode rather than requiring designers to rebuild work from scratch. The app also integrated with App Clips and supported real-time collaboration across Mac and iPhone, which set it apart in a category where most tools require heavy developer involvement to move from prototype to production.
That tight integration with Apple’s own development stack earned Play the Innovation award at the 2025 Apple Design Awards, held during WWDC25 in June 2025. The award category specifically recognises apps that provide “a state-of-the-art experience through novel use of Apple technologies that set them apart in their genre.” Apple celebrated the app as a model of how to use its frameworks, then bought it roughly eight months later and pulled it from sale.
Apple has not said anything publicly about its plans for Play or the Rabbit 3 Times team. The most logical outcome is that Play’s prototyping capabilities get folded into Xcode in some form, giving developers and designers a native, SwiftUI-aware prototyping workflow without needing a third-party tool. Apple could also choose to relaunch Play as a standalone app under its own banner, though the company rarely does that with acqui-hire targets.
For the designers who relied on Play day-to-day, the immediate reality is that the app is gone from the App Store with no replacement yet. Whatever Apple builds with Play’s technology will take time to arrive, and there is no guarantee it will be accessible in the same approachable, standalone way the original app was.
