Photo: TBD
Apple’s Design Resources page is not the kind of thing that makes headlines. It is a reference page — UI kits, icon templates, product bezels, fonts. But if you read it carefully, it tells you exactly where Apple thinks the design tool landscape has landed. And where it has not.
Every UI kit for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26 ships in two formats: Figma and Sketch. Bitmap assets — app icon templates, product bezels — ship as Photoshop and PNG. Adobe XD does not appear once. Not for UI kits, not for templates, not for anything.
For a tool that Adobe positioned as its answer to modern product design, the absence is total.
Adobe XD: officially in maintenance, practically dead
This is not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Adobe stopped investing in XD after its failed Figma acquisition was blocked by regulators in late 2023. The tool entered maintenance mode — bug fixes and security patches only, no new features, no longer available for purchase as a standalone product. It lingers inside Creative Cloud All Apps subscriptions, but no team starting a new project in 2026 would choose it.
Apple’s template page makes this concrete. When a platform vendor drops your tool from its official design resources, the conversation is over. Figma is the standard for collaborative UI design. Sketch retains a presence — particularly in Apple’s own ecosystem, where some templates still require it — but the trajectory is clear.
The real shift: AI design tools are entering the workflow
What is more interesting than Adobe XD’s absence is what is arriving to fill the space it was never able to own — and then some.
Google Stitch, built on the Galileo AI acquisition and powered by Gemini, generates high-fidelity UI from text or voice prompts in minutes. Its March 2026 update added voice canvas, vibe design, and instant prototyping — features that caused Figma’s stock to drop 8.8% on announcement day. Stitch exports production code in seven frameworks including SwiftUI and Flutter. It is free, versus USD 13,200 per year for a 20-person Figma team.
Claude Design, launched by Anthropic in April 2026, takes a different approach. It reads your codebase and existing design files, builds a design system from them automatically, and produces code-powered prototypes — with voice, video, 3D, and built-in AI capabilities. You can point it at your live website and have it generate prototypes that match your production styles. Powered by Claude Opus 4.7, it turns product managers and developers into competent design collaborators without requiring them to learn Figma.
Neither of these tools is a direct replacement for Figma in production design systems. But they are compressing the 0-to-1 phase — the ideation, exploration, and early prototyping work — from days to minutes. For teams building native Apple apps, this changes the economics of design iteration fundamentally.
What this means for teams shipping Apple apps
At exbisoft, we build native iOS and iPadOS applications for enterprise clients. Our developers work in Swift and SwiftUI daily, and design decisions directly affect what ships to production. This tool landscape shift creates practical questions we are actively working through:
Template consumption is straightforward. Apple ships Figma. Our designers work in Figma. That pipeline is settled.
AI tools accelerate the early phases. When a client wants to see three different approaches to an iPad dashboard layout, Google Stitch can generate credible starting points in 20 minutes. When a developer needs to explore how a new interaction pattern would feel before committing to implementation, Claude Design can produce a working prototype from a description and the existing codebase. These are not toys — they are legitimate workflow accelerators.
The bitmap layer stays with Adobe — for now. Product bezels, marketing assets, and icon production templates still ship as Photoshop and PNG. Adobe’s position in raster graphics is not threatened by Figma or the AI design tools. But it is notable that even here, Apple provides PNG as an alternative to Photoshop, reducing the hard dependency.
Smart choices matter more than tool loyalty. The right approach is not “pick one tool.” It is understanding which tool fits which phase: AI tools for rapid ideation and early exploration, Figma for design systems and production-ready specifications, Sketch where Apple’s ecosystem specifically requires it, and Photoshop for bitmap production work. Teams that lock themselves into a single tool — or worse, a discontinued one — lose flexibility at the moment they need it most.
The pattern is bigger than design
This is the same dynamic we see across the development lifecycle. AI tools are not replacing the production tools — they are compressing the discovery and iteration phases that used to consume weeks. The organisations that benefit are the ones that integrate these tools into their existing workflows deliberately, rather than waiting for a single tool to do everything.
Apple’s template page is just a reference page. But the tools it lists — and the one it does not — tell you where the industry is heading.