Apple tried to buy Halide to beef up its Camera app ahead of the iPhone 18 Pro. When that fell through, it hired a co-founder instead. Now there's a lawsuit.
Apple has been actively looking to close the gap between its very well-specced iPhone camera hardware and the superior software experience that third-party developers have been providing for years now. It's a common problem for itself and many manufacturers: third parties often develop and offer better software than their internal teams can manage. And the favoured route for squaring this circle is to acquire the companies in question.
There are countless examples of this. Apple did this only last week with MotionVFX, and did the same with Pixelmator in 2024. The weather app Dark Sky is another famous/infamous example.
So, it's no surprise that, according to Aaron Tilley in The Information, Apple held talks to acquire Lux Optics last summer.
Tilley says that the upcoming pain point for Apple was the forthcoming iPhone 18 Pro. Cupertino reportedly wants the device to match professional-grade cameras in certain advanced features, and saw Lux's software expertise as a route to upgrading its native Camera app.
Not only does Lux have the popular pro-focused stills camera app Halide in its stable, but also the video app Kino, and long-exposure app Spectre. All that helps make it a valuable target.
However, things seem to have gone rather wrong here. The talks ended without a deal in September 2025. Both co-founders, Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With, reportedly concluded they could increase the company's value further before selling.
What happened next is now the subject of litigation. Two months afterwards, Apple hired de With directly. At the time, this was widely read as a straightforward talent acquisition. De With was the main mover behind Lux's UX, and presumably would have been put straight to work on iOS 27.
However it seems that it wasn't that simple. Sandofsky has since filed a lawsuit in the California Superior Court of Santa Cruz alleging that de With was fired from Lux in December 2025 for financial misconduct, specifically misappropriating more than $150,000 in company funds for personal expenses.
More damagingly, the lawsuit also alleges that de With took confidential source code and materials relating to Lux's future features with him when he joined Apple's design team in January 2026.
De With and his legal team deny the claims, stating that no Lux intellectual property was transferred or disclosed. They add that the lawsuit was filed only after de With had raised concerns about financial irregularities at Lux and requested access to its financial records. In other words they say the suit is retaliatory.
An attorney for de With also commented that “The attempt to insert Apple into this dispute appears designed to create leverage and attract attention.“
Job done.
The case is ongoing. Apple is not named as a defendant and faces no allegations of wrongdoing, but would also presumably have preferred to keep all this out of the headlines. Its iPhone hardware seems to be evolving at a pace that its software engineers find hard to keep pace with.
By the time we get round to WWDC 27, it will have to be seen whether a few months in the role will be enough for de With to make a difference before iOS 27 comes out. Or, if Siri-like, new features will be coming in 2027.
As it stands, the Halide website still states that "Lux is Ben Sandofsky, Sebastiaan de With, two friends that are reimagining what photography can look like in the 21st century."