What a year! In 2024 our mission was to create new ways for you to raise the ceiling on the quality and craft of the products you're creating.

Our core focus was around interaction design. Our current design tools do a good job of UI design, but as we know, there is much more to designing software than what it looks like. We need to design how our products feel and function, how they move and behave. That's why we focused our efforts around an entirely new way to design interactions with Play 2.0.

Raising the bar on quality and craft

If you’ve been frustrated by the limitations of your current tools and tired of interactions that never feel real, we’ve built the new Play 2.0 for you.

With Play 2.0 you can bring all your ideas to life with high fidelity interactions that are rendered with the same tech as a finished mobile app.

Here are some of the new features that were a part of the new Play 2.0 launch:

Interaction Prefabs: A prefab is a pre-fabricated, ready-made interaction for you to use in your projects. Search for it. Drag it to your page. And it works like magic.

Variables: You can create string, number, boolean (and soon array!) variables. Combine variables with conditions to build in logic to your interactions.

Conditions: Conditions are the primary way to use logic in Play. They let you use a trigger to fire different actions in different circumstances using an If statement.

Logic & Expressions: Play’s expression editor is an input method that allows you to create more advanced, custom interactions. The expression editor gives you access to trigger properties and over 50 object properties and can be used with variables and conditions.

Animate & Delay: The Animate and Delay blocks apply animation settings or delays to multiple actions at once. You can choreograph multi-action interactions without changing each action’s animation settings individually.

Timers & Loops: Timers give you complete control over how and when your interactions will fire and loops let you to apply actions to all the objects of a page or a stack.

New Triggers & Actions: We added a number of new triggers and actions to 2.0 and made updates to existing ones too.

UI Updates: When you spend multiple hours in a tool daily, the details are critical. Play 2.0 introduces a number new of UI improvements to make your workflow faster and easier.

With Play 2.0, you’re able to tap into Apple native gestures and Core Animation and design interactions that are simply impossible to do in other tools. It’s been incredible to see what our community has already started to create with the latest version of Play!

You can get started with our Interactions demo project, these videos on YouTube and our Intro to Play 2.0 livestream!

Share your native prototypes with an App Clip

We created the easiest, fastest, most realistic way for anyone to experience your native prototype instantly on their iPhone.

By leveraging Apple’s App Clip technology, you’re able to share your prototype instantly to anyone with an iPhone. No app installs. No account creation. No web simulations. Just buttery smooth interactions in the palm of their hand.

Your prototypes will not only load instantly, they’re rendered with the same technology as a finished mobile app, which means they’ll feel real because they are real! They will also resize dynamically to any iPhone model, so you never have to worry about what kind of device your recipient has.

Our users tell us that using App Clips has dramatically improved how they are able to conduct user testing. Now, you can get feedback on your mobile app based on what the real thing feels, acts, and looks like.

Import from Figma, Rive, and Spline!

Play makes it easy to import files from your other favorite tools. You can now bring your designs in from Figma by simply copying and pasting them into Play. Along with this update, we now support SVG import too!

Play respects all your Auto Layout settings in Figma and let’s you continue designing in Play. You can swap out placeholder elements for native maps, date pickers, charts, and more as well as take advantage of Play’s high fidelity interaction design capabilities to bring the full vision of your product idea to life.

You can easily embed any Spline file in our native Webview and upload any Rive file directly into Play. You have access to all the inputs in your Rive file and can control them with interactions in Play. You can also check out this livestream for a deeper dive on how to use Rive in Play.

Created by @Drawsgood

Design for accessibility with dynamic type, color, and light/dark mode support

This year we shipped some powerful new updates that make designing for accessibility more than an afterthought.

Play lets you take advantage of Apple's Dynamic Type, so any text in your design becomes automatically accessible and responds to each user's text size settings. For example, many users have Large Text turned on. By using System Styles in Play, your device will automatically resize your text based on Apple's specific settings for each System Style across type sizes.

We now support Dynamic Type for custom fonts! This means that you can use any font in your designs and have them automatically scale when the accessibility settings are changed on the device in real-time.

This year we introduced Light & Dark Mode for Color Styles. This means that your prototypes can change themes dynamically—either manually by the user or automatically based on iOS Theme.

Game-changer for user testing, making it easy to see how well your designs behave in different scenarios.

Earlier this year we made corner radius its own Style along with color, type, spacing, and gradients. We also added the capability to make your corner radius a squircles too 🙂

Access even more native iOS features—blurs & materials, camera & gyro, haptics & SF Symbol effects

It’s always a challenge trying to match the blurs you create in Figma to what they really look like in iOS. This year we gave you access to more blurs and native materials of iOS. You can now use material blur, layer blur and yes…the REAL progressive blur! Even more powerful, you can control and animate these blurs with interactions. Learn all about how to use native blurs and materials here.

SF Symbol Effects

With over 6,000 SF Symbols to choose from, it has never been easier to find the perfect icon for your designs. This year we gave your more options for animations with the launch of SF Symbol Effects. This means you can tap into the native SF Symbol Effects that Apple has already built into all the SF Symbols. It’s just another way to bring animation and interactivity to your product designs.

Access to Device Hardware

Tapping into device hardware is critical to make your app designs feel truly real. That’s why this year we released the new gyroscope and shake triggers, and added new actions for tapping into the native camera and photo library.

To learn more about how to tap into the native camera in Play you can check out this video or duplicate this tutorial project.

Play already had the ability to add native iOS haptics and we're leveling things up in our next release with the ability to upload custom haptics as well.

Native navigation just got easier

How many times have you designed a tab bar? Creating the tabs, the different variants for the selected states, connecting the pages with interactions…the list goes on. In Play, we give you access to Apple’s native Tab Bar and Nav Bar. They're both completely customizable and come with all the native interactions already baked in.

Can you hear that?

Not only does Play support video but with our latest release, we now support audio too! You can upload your audio files and use the new Set Audio action to control playback of your audio file. Use the new Waveform element to visualize the audio file in real-time too!

If you’re designing an app with audio, there’s no other design tool that will give you the control you need when it comes to sound.

Our community is amazing!

This year we’ve seen hundreds of incredible projects from all of YOU! Its amazing to see the creativity that you are able to unlock with Play. We have more and more teams using Play in their day-to-day work, which is incredible to see.

Our Circle community is now thousands of users and you continue to post your amazing work on X.

We’re posting more content on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok and don’t forget to check out our blog where we post articles, best practices and tip on how to level up your design and prototyping skills.

What’s next in 2025?

2024 was the year where we focused on interaction design and giving you the powerful tools you need to bring your product ideas to life. We’ll continue to add exciting updates in this area with things like arrays, more triggers and actions, the ability to create your own interaction design system with Prefabs and much more.

We’re also going to be working on more ways for teams to work together including Shared Libraries and creating ways to keep your Play files up to date with other tools you might be using.

We're going to be making a couple of exciting announcements early next year about our roadmap. If you thought we shipped a lot in 2024…get ready for 2025 because its going to be incredible!

Thank you for all your continued feedback and support!

— The Play Team