Apple just acquired assets from Rabbit 3 Times, the New York-based company behind Play, an iOS and macOS app that let developers design, prototype and generate SwiftUI code in real time. The deal surfaced this week when the European Commission published the filing on its Digital Markets Act acquisitions page. Play won an Apple Design Award for innovation in 2025.
Apple acquires Play SwiftUI app
Apple’s acquisition of various assets from Play SwiftUI app maker Rabbit 3 Times, including the app itself and the right to hire certain employees, showed up on the EU DMA website’s acquisitions section after the required four-month waiting period after Apple notified regulators in February 2026. This followed the app’s Apple Design Award win for innovation in 2025.
What Play does
Play functions like a combination of Shortcuts and Xcode. The free tool lets developers quickly mock up Swift projects and immediately preview how they would look and behave in use. Designers could build interactive prototypes and sync them in real time across Mac and iPhone, then export those projects to Xcode. That export-to-Xcode service was a paid feature, though Apple made it free after the acquisition closed.
Apple recognized Play with an Apple Design Award for Innovation in 2025. In announcing the honor, Apple called out the app’s “thoughtfully crafted user interface” as one that helps designers “create interactive prototypes and collaborate across Mac and iPhone, all synced in real time for seamless creativity.”
How the deal came to light
Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, large technology companies must report acquisitions that meet certain thresholds. The European Commission then publishes these reports, though no sooner than four months after filing. The listing describes Rabbit 3 Times as offering “iOS and macOS tools for designing, prototyping, and generating SwiftUI code in real-time” — language that lines up precisely with what Play delivered to developers.
Rabbit 3 Times, founded in 2021 and officially incorporated in Delaware, announced it would stop supporting its Play apps for iPhone and Mac starting April 20, 2026. The company’s website, which previously announced “we’re working on something new,” has since gone offline. Play no longer appears in the App Store.
What Apple might do with it
Apple has not made a public statement about the acquisition or its intentions. The deal covers specific assets from Rabbit 3 Times and gives Apple the right to hire some of the company’s staff — a structure consistent with what the industry calls an acqui-hire, where the talent matters as much as the technology.
Analysts expect Apple to fold Play’s functionality into Xcode or release it as a standalone Xcode companion app. Another possibility: Apple integrates Play’s features into its free developer resources over time. Either path would give Apple developers a faster, more visual way to prototype SwiftUI interfaces. That’s something the Play team clearly excelled at, given that Apple itself handed them one of its most prestigious awards less than a year before buying them.
This acquisition follows Apple’s earlier pickup of the open-source Swift Package Index, That suggests the company wants to strengthen its Swift development ecosystem. For Mac and iPhone developers, that trend points toward a future where building apps in SwiftUI grows meaningfully easier.
David Snow, an expert on Apple hardware and software, writes on a variety of technological and cultural topics for Cult of Mac. They include Apple news, technology buying guides, and features about computer setups and Apple TV shows and movies.
With 30 years of experience covering technology and other subjects, he has written and edited for numerous print and online publications, including CMP Media, TechTV.com, CNET, Wired News, Red Herring magazine, Law.com, The National Law Journal and Law Technology News magazine. Among other roles, he served as executive editor of the Law.com network of websites and editorial director, technology, for ALM Media.
Snow graduated with a B.A. from Syracuse University with majors in magazine journalism and psychology. While there, he worked as a reporter for The Daily Orange newspaper and associate editor of Equal Time magazine.
Founder of the blog At the Waterline, he can be reached on X (formerly Twitter) via @atthewaterline and on Mastodon via @dsnow.
