In February, Apple notified the European Commission that it would be acquiring certain assets from and have the right to hire certain employees from Rabbit 3 Times, the company behind the award-winning app design tool Play. The notification was published on the European Commission's website this week, following a four-month waiting period.
Play was a Mac and iPhone app that allowed designers to prototype iPhone app interfaces using Apple's SwiftUI frameworks, and then send them to Xcode.
"Play is a sophisticated yet accessible tool that lets users build interactive prototypes with SwiftUI frameworks," said Apple. "Its thoughtfully crafted user interface is both powerful and easy to navigate, helping designers create interactive prototypes and collaborate across Mac and iPhone, all synced in real time for seamless creativity."
Play is no longer available in the App Store, presumably due to Apple's acqui-hire.
Apple could use the intellectual property that it acquired from the Play app to improve Xcode, but its exact plans remain to be seen.
Apple today announced that apps optimized for the iPhone Duo can now be submitted for App Store approval, ahead of the foldable device launching on Friday, October 23.
While existing App Store apps will automatically run on the iPhone Duo, only apps built with the iOS 27.1 SDK or later can dynamically resize to fill the entire space of the inner display, whereas unoptimized apps will have...
Monday October 19, 2026 3:35 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple acquired AI audio editing app Samplab in June, according to a notice shared today by the European Commission.
Samplab offered a desktop app and plugins for converting audio to MIDI, detecting and editing chords, stem splitting for isolating different parts of a song, and editing notes in polyphonic audio without affecting the timbre of the original.
Apple could fold the company's...
Friday October 16, 2026 3:21 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today expanded its App Store moderation rules to cover AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery. Sexually explicit content was already banned, but now Apple says app developers must proactively prevent and remove AI-generated deepfakes from their platforms. Apple warns that apps with offending content could be removed from the App Store if developers fail to act.
The updated 1.2...
Play was ahead of its time. I really admired the product.
I think they were never able to make the leap that Framer did from prototyping tool to full native app builder because code wasn't the source of truth for their data model. That's no surprise, because this is much harder to do on the native Apple stack than the web.
With generative AI, I'm hoping we can finally get there. I'm excited to see what the team accomplishes at Apple.
confusing that they would take such an ostensibly useful app off the App Store post-acqui-hire but I guess that’s how it goes, hopefully Apple just repositions it as a first-party app and doesn’t let it go to waste
Likely it will be integrated into Xcode and/or Swift Playground.
Apple's first foldable iPhone, with a book-style design featuring a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner display with a minimal crease down the middle.
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