Ben Sandofsky built one of the most respected camera apps on the iPhone. Now he’s in a courtroom battle that pits him against the person who helped him create it — and, indirectly, against the most powerful company in consumer technology.
The co-founder of Halide, the premium manual camera app beloved by photography enthusiasts and tech reviewers alike, has filed a lawsuit against his former partner Sebastiaan de With. The allegations are sweeping: breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, and self-dealing. What makes the case extraordinary isn’t just the interpersonal fallout between two indie developers. It’s that the dispute has surfaced claims about Apple’s relationship with third-party developers that cut to the heart of how the company manages its App Store and developer programs.
According to The Verge, Sandofsky’s complaint alleges that de With secretly negotiated with Apple to secure personal benefits — including a salaried position — while simultaneously serving as co-founder of their joint venture, Lux Optics. The lawsuit claims de With used his role at Halide to gain access to Apple’s inner circles and then leveraged that proximity for his own career advancement, to the detriment of the company they built together.
That’s a serious accusation. And it raises uncomfortable questions about how Apple cultivates relationships with high-profile indie developers.
A Prestige App Becomes a Courtroom Exhibit
Halide launched in 2017 and quickly became one of the flagship examples of what a small, independent team could accomplish on iOS. The app offered manual controls for iPhone photography — RAW capture, focus peaking, histogram displays — at a time when Apple’s own Camera app remained deliberately simple. Apple featured Halide prominently in App Store editorials and keynote presentations. It was, by any measure, an indie success story.
Sandofsky and de With appeared to complement each other well. Sandofsky handled much of the engineering. De With, a designer with a substantial public profile, became the more visible face of the product. He wrote popular blog posts about iPhone camera technology, appeared on podcasts, and cultivated a following on social media that blurred the line between personal brand and company identity.
That dynamic, according to the lawsuit, became the source of the problem.
Sandofsky’s complaint alleges that de With began positioning himself — not Lux Optics — as the primary creative force behind Halide. The suit claims de With used company resources, relationships, and intellectual property to build personal credibility with Apple, eventually parlaying that into employment discussions with the iPhone maker. Per The Verge’s reporting, the lawsuit asserts that de With did not disclose these negotiations to Sandofsky or seek approval from Lux Optics’ board.
If true, this would represent a textbook breach of fiduciary duty under California law. A co-founder of a company cannot secretly pursue opportunities that arise from their position without disclosing them to the other stakeholders. It’s corporate law 101.
But the case gets more complicated — and more interesting — when Apple enters the picture.
The lawsuit doesn’t name Apple as a defendant. But Apple’s conduct is woven throughout the complaint. Sandofsky alleges that Apple’s interactions with de With effectively undermined Lux Optics. The claim is not that Apple acted with malicious intent, but that Apple’s developer relations apparatus — which grants special access, early hardware, and promotional placement to favored developers — created conditions where one co-founder could extract disproportionate personal value from a joint enterprise.
This is a dynamic familiar to anyone who has worked closely with Apple’s developer relations team. The company hand-picks certain developers for early access to unreleased APIs, invites them to private labs at Apple Park, and features their apps in high-visibility placements. These relationships are enormously valuable. A single App Store feature can drive hundreds of thousands of downloads. An appearance in a keynote can define a company’s trajectory.
But those relationships are often personal. Apple’s developer relations managers build rapport with individuals, not corporations. When the individual and the corporation diverge — as Sandofsky alleges happened here — the consequences can be severe.
What This Means for Indie Development on Apple’s Platform
The Halide lawsuit arrives at a moment when Apple’s relationship with independent developers is already under strain. The company faces ongoing antitrust scrutiny in the United States and Europe over its App Store policies. Epic Games’ legal battle forced Apple to make limited concessions on payment processing. The Digital Markets Act in the EU has compelled further changes. Against this backdrop, a lawsuit alleging that Apple’s developer relations practices contributed to the destruction of a small company carries symbolic weight even if Apple isn’t a named party.
Several independent developers, speaking on background, told me the Halide situation reflects a broader structural issue. Apple’s tendency to build relationships with individual developers rather than their companies creates perverse incentives. A designer or engineer who becomes Apple’s point of contact accumulates leverage — over their co-founders, their investors, and their own company’s strategic direction. If Apple wants to feature your app, they call the person they know. Not the LLC.
That informality works fine when co-founders are aligned. When they’re not, it becomes a weapon.
Sandofsky’s complaint also touches on intellectual property concerns. He alleges that de With took proprietary knowledge developed at Lux Optics and used it in contexts that benefited de With personally. The specifics are still emerging as the case progresses through discovery, but the allegation maps onto a common anxiety among technical co-founders: that the public-facing partner will capture the reputational value of jointly developed technology.
De With has not yet filed a detailed public response to the lawsuit’s allegations. His social media presence has continued largely uninterrupted, with posts about photography and design. He has not made public statements about the litigation as of this writing.
The legal mechanics of the case will likely hinge on fiduciary duty and partnership law. California courts have consistently held that partners and co-founders owe each other a duty of loyalty that includes full disclosure of material conflicts. If Sandofsky can demonstrate that de With pursued Apple employment without disclosure, the liability question becomes relatively straightforward. Damages are another matter entirely — quantifying the harm to Lux Optics from a co-founder’s alleged self-dealing will require expert testimony about the company’s valuation, lost opportunities, and diminished goodwill.
There’s also the question of what happens to Halide itself. The app remains available on the App Store and continues to receive updates. But a protracted legal battle between its two creators could freeze development, scare off potential acquirers, and erode the user trust that made the app successful in the first place. Indie apps live and die on the perception of craft and care. A messy public divorce between co-founders undermines that perception, regardless of who’s right.
For Apple, the case presents a reputational risk even without direct legal exposure. The company has spent years cultivating an image as a champion of independent developers — the “there’s an app for that” ethos that made the iPhone platform culturally dominant. Stories about Apple’s developer relations practices enabling co-founder disputes don’t serve that narrative. Neither does the implication that Apple might recruit talent from the very indie studios it publicly celebrates.
Apple declined to comment on the lawsuit when contacted by The Verge.
The Bigger Picture
Co-founder disputes are as old as Silicon Valley itself. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg. The Halide case is smaller in scale but structurally similar: two people with complementary skills build something valuable, then disagree about who contributed what and who deserves what.
What distinguishes this case is the platform dependency. Halide exists only because Apple’s iPhone exists. Its value is entirely contingent on Apple’s hardware, software, and distribution infrastructure. That dependency gives Apple enormous implicit power over every company built on its platform — power that extends to interpersonal dynamics between co-founders when Apple’s attention becomes a contested resource.
So where does this end? Probably in settlement. Most co-founder lawsuits do. The cost of litigation, the distraction from building product, and the reputational damage to both parties create strong incentives to resolve things privately. But if the case does proceed to trial, it could produce discovery that illuminates how Apple’s developer relations actually work behind closed doors. That alone makes it worth watching.
For now, Sandofsky is fighting for control of something he helped build. De With is defending his reputation and his right to pursue his career. And Apple, as usual, is the most powerful party in the room — shaping outcomes without appearing on any docket.
The iPhone’s camera keeps getting better every year. The story of the people who pushed it forward just got a lot messier.