Want to try the macOS Golden Gate beta without risking your main Mac? Here's how to install it on a separate APFS volume alongside macOS Tahoe and switch between the two.

I love poking at a new macOS beta as much as anyone, but it can be a risky move to put it on your main computer. An iPhone beta is a low stakes thing. A macOS beta is a different animal. There's just more that can break, more legacy software and hardware in the mix, and the last thing I want is some app I rely on going sideways for weeks while I wait for a fix.

So I don't gamble with my main install. Instead, I put macOS Golden Gate on its own APFS volume, keep macOS Tahoe exactly where it is, and switch between the two whenever I feel like it. Both run natively, at full speed, and they quietly share the same free space on my drive so I'm not carving out a fixed chunk ahead of time. No virtual machine, no second Mac, no wiping anything.

Trust me on this one, it's easier than it sounds.

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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. 

*"Play is a sophisticated yet accessible tool that lets users build interactive prototypes with SwiftUI frameworks,"*

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."*

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Apple has released Xcode 26.6, and the update lets developers use Google's Gemini as a built in coding assistant for the first time.

The new version is available now from the App Store. With it, programmers can select Gemini to help write, test, and debug code without leaving Apple's development environment.

# Three AI assistants to choose from

Gemini becomes the third large language model that Xcode supports natively. The software already let developers pick between Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex, and Gemini now sits alongside both as a selectable option.

Each assistant runs in a panel next to the active code, so developers can ask programming questions and get suggestions inline. The goal is to keep coders inside Xcode rather than sending them to a browser or a separate app for answers.

Apple has steadily widened third party AI support across its developer tools over the past year. Adding another model continues that approach and leaves the choice of assistant up to the individual developer or team.

# Setting it up

Teams that already pay for a Gemini Enterprise plan can connect their existing account credentials directly inside Xcode. Individual developers who want to try the assistant first can add a free API key instead, which lets them test Gemini without paying for a subscription.

It is not yet clear whether Apple plans to add further models beyond the current three. The company has not commented on its longer term plans for assistant support in Xcode.

# What else is in the update

Beyond the new assistant, Xcode 26.6 carries the usual collection of bug fixes and stability improvements. Apple says the release bundles the latest version of the Swift framework along with updated SDKs for building apps across its mobile and desktop platforms.

Developers running the standard release can download the update today and configure their preferred coding assistant from within the app.

There is no shortage of AI tools promising to turn a sentence into a working app. Most of them quietly hand you a web app in a native shell and hope you don't look too closely. 

Bitrig is taking a different swing. You describe what you want to build, and it generates real Swift and SwiftUI that you can read, edit, and ship to the App Store. The pitch is simple, but the people making it are the reason I keep using it.

Real Swift, not a web app in disguise

The code Bitrig produces is the same Swift and SwiftUI you'd write by hand. You can open it, change it, and learn from it, and you can export the whole project whenever you want. That alone separates it from a lot of the "describe it and ship it" crowd, where the output is a black box you're not really meant to touch.

The workflow is conversational. You tell Bitrig what to change in plain English, it updates the code, and a simulator running right next to your editor reflects the change immediately. You're not guessing at what your app looks like or waiting on a separate build step. You see what your users will see as you go. And it isn't limited to one device. You can build for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac from the same place.

The part that makes me take it seriously

What excites me is who is behind this. Bitrig is built by co-creators and longtime members of Apple's SwiftUI team. CEO Kyle Macomber, along with co-founders Jacob Xiao and Matt Ricketson, all co-created and led the development of SwiftUI at Apple, with past work spanning the Swift standard library, UIKit, Xcode, and tvOS. 

Design co-founder Tim Donnelly built Storehouse, an Apple Design Award winning app later acquired by Square, and worked on SwiftUI and Xcode Previews during his time at Apple.

That pedigree matters here in a way it wouldn't for a generic code generator. These are the people who designed the framework Bitrig is generating. The company frames its own mission as a continuation of what SwiftUI started, which it describes as lowering the barrier to entry "without lowering the standard for quality." 

That's a high bar to set for yourself, and it's exactly the right one for a tool aimed at people who care about craft but find traditional native development intimidating.

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