Figma takes down its custom design tool over Apple trespass 

Figma has disabled its Make Designs tool temporarily after it was found to repeatedly copy Apple’s design for its weather app.

Design compnay Figma said it is pulling down its new ‘Make Designs’ tool after it was found to produce designs that looked very similar to Apple’s iOS weather app. CEO Dylan Field announced the removal on X, admitting that rushing the release of the tool may have led to this. 

The similarities were first pointed out by Andy Allen, the founder of NotBoring Software that has built a range of applications. While testing the tool, he found that it would repeatedly copy Apple’s Weather app when used as an assistant.

Allen, then posted on X saying Figma had “heavily” trained its tool on existing apps which Field has denied. 

However, in a conversation with The Verge, CTO Kris Rasmussen answered a question around the training data of their Make Designs tool saying he wasn’t sure as Figma wasn’t responsible for training the AI models it used.

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The tool is simply built on OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan Image Generator G1, he added, meaning it was possible that OpenAI and Amazon had trained their models on Apple’s designs. 

Rasmussen also said that the Make Designs tool was still in beta and should be re-enabled “soon.”