Apple Hires iPhone Camera App Halide’s Co-Founder for Its Design Team

Apple has added a familiar name from the iPhone photography world to its design ranks. Sebastiaan de With, the co-founder of Lux, the company behind popular iPhone photo and video apps such as Halide and Kino, announced on Wednesday that he has joined Apple’s design team.

This marks de With’s second stint at Apple. Earlier in his career, he worked at the company on products including iCloud and Find My. Before co-founding Lux in 2016 with Ben Sandofsky, de With built a design résumé that included work for Sony, T-Mobile, and Mozilla.

“So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products,” de With wrote in a post on X, confirming the move.

Some big personal news: I’ve joined the Design Team at Apple.

So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products. ✌️ pic.twitter.com/9gzU4ziIJ7 — Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) January 28, 2026

At the same time, Sandofsky reassured users that Lux’s apps will continue independently. In a Reddit post, he said that Lux will actively develop Halide. Also, Halide released a public preview of a significant update, Halide Mark III, that introduces a renewed focus on “Looks”—a feature designed to recreate the aesthetic qualities of classic film cameras.

De With joins Apple during a period of notable change inside the company’s design organisation. The Liquid Glass design language introduced with iOS 26 did not receive the level of praise Apple may have anticipated, prompting renewed scrutiny of its design direction. Compounding that shift, Apple’s longtime chief of user interface design, Alan Dye, departed the company in December to join Meta.

More recently, Bloomberg reported that John Ternus, widely seen as a potential successor to Tim Cook, assumed oversight of both hardware and software design toward the end of last year.

Against that backdrop, de With’s return brings an experienced designer with deep roots in Apple’s ecosystem back into the company at a moment when its design leadership and visual direction are evolving.