Ben Sandofsky

Ben Sandofsky is a software engineer and co-founder of Lux Optics, the small independent studio behind the iPhone camera apps Halide, Kino and Spectre. Lux's apps have won some of Apple's highest honours: Spectre was the 2019 iPhone App of the Year, Halide Mark II won a 2022 Apple Design Award, and Kino was named iPhone App of the Year in the 2024 App Store Awards.

In 2009 Sandofsky moved to San Francisco to join Twitter while it was still a small startup, an experience he later wrote about in an essay on the end of the Twitter era. He went on to build Halide with designer Sebastiaan de With, as a pro camera app that gives iPhone photographers manual focus, exposure and RAW capture behind a tactile, gesture-driven interface. Lux followed it with Spectre, a computational long-exposure camera, Kino, a cinematic video camera with film-inspired grades and LUT support, and Orion, a free app that turns an iPad into an HDMI monitor.

Sandofsky leads engineering at Lux and writes many of its widely read technical breakdowns of new iPhone cameras, Apple Log and HDR. He also publishes essays on his own site about technology and building products without venture capital, including why he believes companies like Apple cannot be built with venture funding.

The partnership with de With ended in early 2026. In January 2026 Apple hired de With for its design team, and in March 2026 Sandofsky and Lux filed a lawsuit against him in Santa Cruz County Superior Court, alleging financial misconduct and the transfer of confidential material; de With's lawyers deny the claims. Reports also said Apple had held talks to acquire Lux in 2025 that did not result in a deal. Sandofsky has continued to run Lux, shipping Halide Mark III and further Halide updates through 2026.

He matters as the engineer behind one of the most decorated independent app studios on the App Store, showing how a very small team could compete with Apple's own Camera app on craft and depth.