AI-native prototyping tools in 2026: Prototo vs Figma Make vs ProtoPie vs Origami

A new kind of design tool builds the real thing from a description instead of faking it on a canvas. Here is how the main options compare, and where each one lands on the measure that matters: native

Prototyping is one of the most important things I do as a designer, actually at every level even today as Chief of Design. It is where early thinking becomes something you can see, a look into the future of a product before it exists.

I use it to set a vision, and I use it to improve what already ships, to move an activation number, a retention curve, or a drop-off that will not budge. Either way the value is the same. You get to feel the thing, not just describe it.

A real prototype shows the interaction, not only the screens. How you move between them, where a gesture lands, what happens in different states. That is what makes it useful in a design crit or review because those experiences are exactly where the edge cases show up.

That is where most of today’s prototyping tools stop short. They render the screens well. The part that matters most in review, how it actually feels to move through the product on a real device, is the part they cannot fully give you yet.

I have spent months evangelizing Figma Make. I built a reusable UI library on top of it so my generated screens matched our real components, and I have written more than one piece on getting accurate work out of it.

Sometime last year, iOS 26 shipped Liquid Glass. I kept prompting for that true native feel on mobile, and I kept getting something close but not quite real. The preview is a webview. It can look like an iOS app in a screenshot. It does not move like one on a phone.

That gap between looking native and being native is what this whole category is now racing to close. I have used the main tools on real projects. Every one of them is good at the job it was built for.

Here is where each is genuinely great, and where each one stops.

The comparison at a glance

These are the columns I actually weigh when I pick a prototyping tool. No tool here is bad. They are built for different jobs, and the table is about fit, not a scoreboard.

Native is the column I feel most on mobile. A webview can look identical to the real thing in a still. On a device, native gestures, haptics, and scroll physics are the difference you notice in the first two seconds.

Figma Make

Figma Make brought prompt-to-app into the tool I already live in. You describe an interface, it writes working code, and you iterate without leaving Figma. I built a reusable UI library on top of it so its output tracked our real design system, and for web and cross-platform concepts it is fast and genuinely good.

Where it stops for me is native mobile. The preview runs in a webview, so with iOS 26 Liquid Glass I could not get a true native feel no matter how I prompted. That is not a knock on the tool. Web output is the right call for a lot of what I make. It is just not the native iOS reference I want to hand an engineer.

Best for: Web and cross-platform concepts, and teams already standardized on Figma. It is still my default for those.

ProtoPie

ProtoPie is the most capable interaction tool I have used, and I have pushed it hard. At Grab I used it on a purpose-built vehicle project, simulating a driver dashboard, a rear passenger dashboard, and the passenger app, all wired together across devices with handoff sessions between them. Nothing else came close for that kind of work.

That is also the honest boundary. It is a canvas-and-timeline tool, and that multi-device, sensor-rich scenario is a once-in-a-blue-moon project. For everyday screen work it is more machinery than the job needs, and the result is a high-fidelity simulation rather than native code.

Best for: Complex, multi-device, sensor-driven interaction work where hand-authored control is the whole point.

Origami Studio

Origami Studio, from Meta, has a devoted following and a patch graph that can express real logic and animation. It produces convincing, high-fidelity results. I downloaded it ready to learn it.

I gave up. The learning curve was steep, the node canvas sits closer to engineering than design, and I could not justify the time to get fluent. That is a me decision, not a verdict on the tool. Designers who have invested in the patch model get a lot from it. I am not one of them.

Best for: Designers already fluent in the patch-graph model who want deep, hand-built control.

Prototo

Prototo is the one I built, for exactly the gap the others left me: native iOS fidelity, from a designer’s hands, without an engineer or learning React Native.

You describe a screen to your coding agent, Claude Code or Codex, and it renders as a real native iOS app. Real gestures, real haptics, Liquid Glass, actual scroll physics. There is no canvas and no IDE. The iOS Simulator is the canvas, the agent is the design tool, and you never open a file.

> add a native bottom tab bar with a blur background

It is native because it runs on the native runtime, not a webview. From installing Prototo Desktop a running prototype in the Simulator takes under 90 seconds, and you can publish a link anyone opens and runs natively on their own iPhone. It crossed 5,000 installs, 3,600 of them in the first week.

The honest boundary: Prototo is a prototyping tool, not a production build pipeline. You get prototypes you test, share, and hand off.

Best for: Product designers who want native iOS prototypes from a prompt, with no canvas, no IDE, and no waiting on an engineer.

The Play-shaped gap

Before Prototo, the closest thing to native fidelity without engineering was Play. Designers built with real SwiftUI components, and it won a 2025 Apple Design Award. I downloaded it too. Same wall as Origami, too technical for my liking, and I gave up before I got anywhere.

In 2026 Apple acquired the team, and Play wound down, with support ending in April. Designers who wanted native fidelity without the engineering are now looking for where to go next. Prototo answers that with a prompt-native workflow instead of a canvas to learn.

So which one

1. Native iOS prototypes from a prompt, no canvas, no IDE → Prototo.

2. Web concepts, fast, inside Figma → Figma Make.

3. Deep, multi-device interaction design → ProtoPie.

4. Patch-graph control you have already invested in → Origami Studio.

Every tool here is good at the job it was built for and I still reach for most of them.