Sebastiaan de With isn’t just joining Apple’s design team; in a lot of ways, it feels like Apple is hiring one of the sharpest outside critics of the iPhone camera and folding him back into the mothership. For anyone who has followed iPhone photography over the last decade, this is one of those moves that instantly makes sense.

If you’ve ever gone down a rabbit hole reading a 4,000-word camera breakdown for a new iPhone, there’s a good chance you’ve bumped into de With’s work. As co-founder and creative lead at Lux, the studio behind Halide, Kino, Spectre, and Orion, he’s built a mini empire of camera apps that are almost aggressively opinionated about how photography on a phone should feel. His reviews of devices like the iPhone 16E and iPhone 17 Pro have been part camera test, part mood piece — calling the 16E’s camera a “vibe” while still zooming in on noise patterns, skin tones, and the way Apple’s processing engine handles contrast.

That mix of nerdy technical detail and slightly romantic obsession with “feel” is exactly what made Halide stand out in the first place. Launched in 2017 by de With and former Twitter engineer Ben Sandofsky, Halide was pitched as the camera app for people who actually wanted to think about things like ISO, shutter speed, and focus peaking, but without suffering through a cluttered, DSLR-style UI. The philosophy was simple: don’t make an app with a bunch of sliders; make a camera that just happens to live behind glass.

You can see that thinking everywhere in Halide’s design. Gestures replace clunky menus so that adjusting exposure or focus becomes almost muscle memory, like reaching for a physical dial. Pro tools such as RAW capture, histograms, depth controls, and manual focus are there, but they’re tucked into a layout that doesn’t scream “pro mode” at you — the complexity is present, just not overwhelming. That same attitude carried into other Lux apps: Spectre, a long-exposure app that won Apple’s iPhone App of the Year in 2019, and Kino, a video app that leans into cinematic looks and pro codecs while still feeling approachable.

In the last few years, Lux doubled down on the idea that not every photo has to be soaked in machine learning. The best example is Process Zero, a Halide mode that effectively says “no thanks” to a lot of the heavy-handed computational photography that’s become standard on modern phones. Instead of stacking multiple frames, aggressively lifting shadows, and smoothing skin into oblivion, Process Zero tries to behave more like a traditional camera: one frame, more honest contrast, intact shadows, and highlights that blow out when the scene is actually too bright. It’s a subtle rebellion against the default iPhone look — one that resonated enough with enthusiasts that some writers now say Halide with Process Zero is the only camera they use.

That context makes Apple’s hire feel almost like a full-circle moment. De With actually worked with Apple years ago on products like iCloud, MobileMe, and the Find My apps, before setting off to build his own studio and develop these third-party cameras that, at times, out-shoot Apple’s own software for certain users. Now he’s going back inside, this time not as an agency designer but as a member of Apple’s design team, focused — in his own words — on his “favorite products.” His social posts announcing the move on X and Instagram were brief, but you can feel the excitement: someone who has spent years poking at the edges of what the iPhone camera can be is getting access to the actual levers.

It also comes at a pretty interesting moment for Apple’s design organization. The company’s UI group has been going through changes: its long-time head of user interface design, Alan Dye, departed for Meta in late 2025, while Apple has been quietly rethinking parts of its software design direction, from the controversial “Liquid Glass” look in iOS 16 to the way newer versions of iOS treat customization and pro features. Bringing in someone like de With — who lives at the intersection of photography, interaction design, and the culture around cameras — looks less like a one-off hire and more like a statement that Apple is willing to bring respected outsiders into the fold.

For the Halide crowd, the immediate question was: what happens to the apps? Sandofsky was quick to answer that in a Reddit thread: Halide isn’t going anywhere. He pointed out that Lux has already been operating more like a small studio than a two-person side project, with collaborators like The Iconfactory working on Halide Mark III and colorist Cullen Kelly contributing to its new “Looks” system. The public preview of Mark III just went live, and the early reception, according to Sandofsky, has been better than they hoped — which is a pretty strong signal that Lux plans to keep pushing its own ideas about what an iPhone camera can feel like, even with one co-founder now on the inside at Apple.

Still, you can’t help but imagine how de With’s fingerprints might show up on Apple’s own camera and photo experience in a few years. This is someone who spends weekends shooting film, obsessing over lens rendering and tonal roll-off, then comes back and tries to translate that analog feel into a clean, modern interface. You see that analog/digital tension in Halide’s UI: minimalist black-and-white visuals, gently animated controls, and a clear bias toward staying out of your way once you’re composing a shot. If any of that sensibility migrates into the stock Camera app or future pro tools — whether that’s subtler processing, better manual controls, or just more thoughtful defaults — it could make everyday iPhone photography feel less like battling algorithms and more like actually taking pictures.

There’s also a strategic angle here. Apple has watched third-party camera apps set the tone with features like RAW shooting, manual controls, and advanced live previews, only to later bring similar ideas into its own ecosystem. Halide isn’t the only app in that space, but it is arguably the most culturally influential among serious shooters, with Apple itself spotlighting the team in “Behind the Design” features and developer stories. Hiring de With is a way of internalizing that external pressure — instead of just responding to what apps like Halide are doing, Apple now has one of the people defining that conversation sitting in its design meetings.

For users, nothing changes overnight. Halide remains in the App Store, Lux continues shipping updates, and Apple’s Camera app works exactly the way it did last week. But if you zoom out, this hire fits into a broader pattern: Apple pulling in high-profile, opinionated designers and developers who built beloved tools on top of its platforms, and then using their instincts to shape the next phase of the ecosystem. In a world where phone cameras have become one of the main reasons people upgrade — and where the line between “photo” and “AI-generated image” is getting blurrier — having someone in the room who still cares deeply about how a real scene looks through a small piece of glass might be more important than ever.

In other words, if you’re the kind of person who turns off Smart HDR, shoots RAW, and knows exactly where your histogram toggle lives, this is one of those quietly huge bits of news. The guy who helped build your favorite pro camera app just got a badge in Cupertino — and the long game here could reshape not just how Halide evolves, but how the iPhone itself sees the world.