**The Future of Photography: An Exclusive Interview with Halide Co-Founders**

In this special episode of the Apple Insider Podcast, we're joined by the co-founders of popular camera app Halide, Ben and Chris Smith. The duo shares their insights on the future of photography and what's in store for Apple's upcoming iPhone releases.

"We're always like famously mum about what we're working on," said Ben, "but I think I remember it was so funny when my mom was visiting us before we launched Halide. She said, 'Aren't there a lot of camera apps already?' And I thought at that point it was just getting started... the cameras were just about getting good enough." Chris chimed in, "I think at this point we're getting to a point where cameras are starting to enter really exciting territory and it's not just that they can take pictures but it's sensing and being sensors of the world and enabling all the applications that that enables with all the computational magic is really really cool."

One of the most exciting developments in camera technology, according to Chris, is the ability to make photographic things "kind of magic" through advanced technology. "We're talking about making a lot of photographic things kind of magic and work through the advanced technology that's in these things," he explained. "It's really exciting and I don't know exactly what Apple has in store for it but it's going to be really cool to kind of roll with the punches and play with whatever's coming out."

The co-founders also discussed how their move to subscription-based models has given them more freedom to experiment with new ideas. "We can now support certain things like hardware that require the cloud or whatever," said Ben. "It's gonna be really fun thinking about stuff a little more than just camera, direct press a button to capture kind of stuff."

**The Daily Drivers of Halide Co-Founders**

When it comes to their own daily drivers, Ben and Chris were open about their preferences. "I have the 12 Pro," said Ben. "I have a reputation of losing phones so I thought I'll go cheap." Chris, on the other hand, has been using the iPhone 12 Pro Max as his daily driver.

"I did the 12 mini for a little bit, I really missed the telephoto lens," explained Chris. "Like I thought like oh I won't be able to live without it... But I can live without pro raw." Ben also mentioned that he's used film cameras from time to time when he wants to take a break from iPhone photography.

**Luxe.camera: A Hub for Photography Enthusiasts**

In addition to their work with Halide, Ben and Chris are also behind the popular camera app Luxe.camera. "We write articles on there about photography," explained Ben. "Whenever new stuff comes out like when a new iPhone or iPad is released we dig into the cameras and find our little surprises and superpowers." The website, which is available at luxe.camera, offers courses and resources for photography enthusiasts.

To learn more about Luxe.camera and Halide, listeners can sign up for membership and access exclusive content. The duo will also be appearing in show notes, where they'll provide links to their apps and website.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the apple insider podcast today we have a special interview episode with the team from the makers of halide popular app for the iphone and now ipad you can hear talk about their app the app store and whatever else we get to we have all three members which is very exciting first of all sebastian de with has joined us thanks for joining us sebastian good to be here and from your twitter bio i gathered you're a designer photographer and motorcycle person i don't know the exact term for motorcycle lure motorcycle extraordinaire whatever that list whatever works yeah i'm i'm fine with anything very good and i also saw that you used to work for apple is that correct on some of the design of mobile me and icloud yes correct oh very cool so that's sebastian to with we also have ben sandovsky he used to be the lead twitter ios developer he helped really launch the app for the iphone the twitter app there how's it going ben good good yeah thanks for having me and i am correct you used to work for twitter and i was reading in on your website that when you joined twitter you could fit the entire team around one large lunch table and then shortly after you left the company it was over 3 500 employees does that sound about right sounds about right i think it was like a thousand engineers and uh i was a second ios developer so uh we we uh acquired tweety and so yeah i didn't build it myself but to help scale out the team over the time while i was there so yeah awesome and finally we have rebecca slatkin i would say you're an ios developer extraordinaire i saw you know many places you've worked including an adjunct professor at syracuse university so thanks for being here rebecca of course thanks for having me so my first question is you guys have a company together and obviously you're all in the same world ios developers and all that kind of stuff but how did you actually find each other and decide to start a company together see well originally uh after twitter i wasn't quite sure what i wanted to work on next so i did a bunch of different things uh and i kept returning to well i want to do computer graphics and i'm getting really into photography and so i thought about building like a side app to learn computer graphics uh and scratch this itch it would be like a manual photography app and so i started building it and it was an incredibly ugly but functional app uh like okay cool so now i just have to spend 20 or 30 years learning to be a designer or i could find someone else via of all places twitter uh and who uh was also really into photography and so we were mutual follows and so i slid into the dms and i was up living in san francisco at the time uh and uh so was i and so there was a coffee shop halfway in between and you know that first nervous coffee meeting and then um yeah and they're like okay cool that sounds like a great uh idea and uh next thing you know we were shipping halide 1.0 that's awesome rebecca how did you find this team and become a part of it i hunted them down i would say ben and i became mutual friends um through twitter i loved his blog and as an ios developer it was nice to find someone with higher level engineering principles that i agreed with so looking beyond the scope of like the basic implementation of ios development uh ben seemed to really have a good understanding of um higher level architecture and um we became friends with twitter i think you know witty tweets back and forth mostly from ben we met up um like most people at uh wwdc drunkenly and became fast friends we have a hometown connection uh i think we our first discussion was over uh larping at wpi um so the uh what is that it's the live action plan yeah the live action role playing uh that happens at his college uh that i was familiar with from watching and uh yeah i think we used to i worked for a company based out here in san francisco um so i'd come out here a lot and i would you know i'd meet up with ben and his wife and then sebastian and um i don't know eventually right yeah they were like come work for us yeah at the beginning of a pandemic yeah right it's amazing a lot actually happened in that year in addition to the pandemic you know so pretty wild so you guys have one of the most popular photography and camera apps i'd be curious what you actually refer to it as you had 1.0 and just recently released 2.0 was a big update and now for ipad and maybe if you could kind of give us an idea maybe if our listeners had never heard of halide why would someone want this secondary camera app as opposed to just the built-in camera app and what makes it unique there is an incredibly good camera app built into your iphone uh it's really really great and me and ben loved like increasingly the kind of photos that our iphones were producing while we were lugging around these extremely heavy big cameras with all these buttons and gears and dials on them and while it's great to have all those buttons and gears and dials um it doesn't necessarily translate like it sometimes it can translate to a better photo but definitely not to a better photo taking experience and when ben contacted me apple uh it was around wwc as well apple just announced that they were going to expose some of those dials to developers and there were definitely already apps out there that had controls like camera controls basically um but they were all really complex much like those cameras like if you looked at them and you just gave them to someone they were very intimidating and we felt like there wasn't really a middle ground between the apple camera app or if you tap on something it immediately changes both the focus and the exposure and like it's very it's very very basic and very user friendly obviously and like just something that looks like um if anyone has seen the chernobyl hbo mini series there's this control room and it has 650 thousand buttons that are just unlabeled and little dials and everything it kind of looks like that and like we didn't want that you know people just learn about screaming because like it intimidated me to see all those buttons and i'm into photography so like something kind of approaches the middle ground of it and that is kind of what highlight is it's something that can give you a bit more control over your camera because the cameras are getting really good on your iphone but it's not going to immediately overwhelm you it might even help you learn a little bit about photography so when the iphone 12 came out i believe one of the big features was pro raw meaning that you can now use a raw type format directly on the iphone and you have access to that and halide was one of the you know early apps to adopt that i think you guys actually had a long article about explaining what what raw is which is complicated in itself but it's a great article i'll include that link in the show notes but when that came out pro raw then you also updated your app to 2.0 so what was the big change or what were the big feature updates maybe was pro raw but that also came to 2.0 of halide so i think that uh we launched halide in 2017 and you put something out in the world when it's just built by two people you're like okay this seems like this is right okay cool and then you get into a lot of hands and they really quickly are like okay what wait oh well okay that's good and so you know it was uh i would say the 2.0 wasn't like we totally threw everything out but it's like okay let's rethink how the interface works let's uh rethink like from using the app we tend to reach for one particular control more often and also the hardware was getting better around like being able to do auto exposure so is this sort of like resetting certain assumptions so we started thinking about that like a year and a half into halide and we shipped it free three and a half years later so it was really uh that was a long time coming and i think that then prora also speaks to apple's prioritization of the camera systems and how they're also rethinking what professional photography looks like on the iphone like we launched with regular raw which is way more of an advanced concept despite the name than prora and so it was a chance for us to reset ui expectations and then it made it also on a technical level it was easier to integrate pro raw like you know they launched like a few weeks before christmas and so we were able to get it up pretty quickly um so yeah it's just a number of different things but um to your point about the article i think that what's also interesting from us is trying to approach these advanced photography concepts and make them a little more approachable to like our parents uh i would say pro might be not quite there yet but looking forward where we're gonna be in a few years and like we really want to invest more and like teaching people about photography and sort of like graduating beyond this very you know first party camera where just press a button it does everything for you like how do we get people to learn more advanced or concepts yeah cool so one of the other changes with halide 2.0 was your guys's pricing structure and i think now in 2021 people understand what they're paying for in a subscription you know a developer works on an app ongoing you know whether you buy it with one cost and then you have it forever or you have a subscription model so people i think understand more but it's still kind of a barrier for some people they're averse to subscriptions but you guys went to that pricing model with halide 2.0 and i'd love to talk about the morning of launch and what kind of happened there with your upgrade pricing and all that in a moment but tell me what the internal conversations were like when you were discussing should we go to subscription should we stick with one time purchase how did that all go we still do offer one-time purchases yeah you still do you still do yeah yeah yeah that was an interesting one we're coming off a thing that a lot of developers run into uh if you were to look at a chart of the lifetime of your app most people uh when they launch the app you get a big spike and after that it goes down and you kind of get turned into this ambient place where you never quite get that spike again that spike obviously cannot sustain the development of your app forever so we had been making highlight for three years we sold it once and people were getting free updates for years and while that's a great deal for our users and we totally wanted people to have free updates forever we at some point we can keep working on it without doing a paid update we wanted to do a big update and we also wanted to charge for it um so then there was a question how were we going to do this it was rather challenging there were a few different options and all of them seemed really difficult because we obviously are in the app store the app store limits certain things like you cannot do a paid update for instance if people already have the app you cannot make a second paid app for a lower price as an update for the existing users um but there are make an entirely different app and then you have to buy that one exactly and then we would have two halides in the app store and then people would be like i bought the other halide and you're not updating it for some reason because it would just be really confusing and really problematic so we thought okay we're just going to make a new update and it's going to be an update to the existing app so everybody's going to get the update but then we thought how what's going to happen to people that already have the app right and after a lot of deliberation we thought oh like we definitely don't want people to happen is it's a camera app they go to the beach or it's beautiful sunset they open the app and it says congratulations here's highlight v2 uh you can't use it unless you pay right not a good experience yeah not a great experience we never want people to have that experience so we uh looked at a couple different options like in-app purchases whatever but it would always run into that problem of continuity um so in the end we thought okay well there's a clear trade-off here between our users and our bottom line like money basically and we're like well i guess we're just gonna give the whole update away for free to everybody that already had uses halide and then everybody who's new to halide they get the option to subscribe um or to do a one-time purchase and um we launched that and we were really happy with the the idea and i think when we talked to a lot of people were like that's beyond fair it seems like a really great solution and then um and then we launched so there was a bug yeah i will say though about deciding um how you wanted to approach it or how you wanted to do right by your mark 1 users is we had a lot of internal discussions about what we would want as users what seemed fair to us we even thought about companies outside of the app store that did right by their customers for instance like having an easy return policy and um what positive experience would we've had and we sort of applied that to our pricing and our implementation it's so interesting too because i don't know your all's ages but when i was buying software as a teenager there were big boxes you would go to a store and you would spend 60 to 80 on a box and you never got updates you know if there was a new version of microsoft office or whatever other app you had to spend a whole another eighty dollars when that came out and so it's interesting how that has changed over time but on the morning you guys were gonna launch 2.0 one of the things you had implemented was if you had previously purchased halide 1.0 that you those users would be able to upgrade for a certain amount of time or for free they would get the upgrade for free and you had some press releases about to go out at 9 00 a.m on launch day and you discovered a bug i think was at seven something in the morning so less than two hours before it's going to launch publicly that that upgrade feature was not working and that whole swath of customers that had already purchased your app were going to be shown that they could upgrade for free and not be able to and that's a serious bug talk to me about that moment of realization and and how that next hour and a half went i should check my heart rate right now that morning especially as the the the one higher where my real only responsibility was subscriptions it was um like i have one job you had one job when two people touch the same code base and they read the same documentation and read it wrong right like get the docs wrong once for me or whatever right yeah um yeah you read you need to read the small print and ultimately it was um a dev environment change that we didn't anticipate and i was on the east coast so i was dressed at least and i had food which made you know i wasn't dry heaving like ben but uh we i been it was nice to see ben um you know everyone stayed calm and we just cared about fixing the bug and i think we had to really we wanted to test it with people who had previously purchased halide and i think we learned all that morning of which one of our friends had never downloaded it because we really needed to like reach out to friends who hadn't upgraded so but they needed to be previous owners and learning like my parents or like my brother didn't have halide was pretty insulting but yeah ben sort of took the reigns and you know i i remember tweeting or dming people on twitter hey hey hey hey could you test something for me real quick like yeah so the moral is have a twitter account and uh slide into dms a lot and ask for qa from friends right so but the m sliding has been paying off for ben for a while yeah yeah yeah yeah it's your top scale what did save us too is that we had thought i did implement a hidden debug menu that had our receipt information and display so we had been using it internally and ben was smart and made it actually an endpoint so our friends could easily send it to us so we could actually see what was going on that really helped narrow the problem and that's why i think we were able to fix it so quickly as we had made it accessible secretly to people yeah so what ended up happening uh just to clarify people too is like oh like if your release goes out like it goes out before you're officially launching like how does that happen exactly if you want to coordinate an app launch one of the big things you want to do is you work with press like apple insider for instance we send people our our app and some information ahead of time and then we're like we're going to release at nine and before then we're not going to talk about it so that the press also gets an exclusive moment to to scoop it sort of to like talk about it first um and then we flip the switch for other band flips to switch in the app store that it becomes available for sale and we do that a few hours before that what's called an embargo like the silent period so the app store has a chance to update sometimes it takes a really long time we've had updates that actually took like half a day to show up and then there's all this press and people like where's the update um so we started noticing on our twitter account which we could not public like you know do a big announcement from before it was out that people were replying to us like hey what the bleep what is this i paid for this app and i can't take photos so it was suddenly like one two ten a hundred replies oh and we had a really big inbox full of stuff so we we really like went through quickly unfortunately also we managed right i worked with really talented people that managed to fix it but also apple worked with us to get a quick fix out and i think it was by nine right by nine o'clock fixed fortunately that's amazing yeah kudos too that's awesome teamwork from the three of you yeah yeah so one of the new devices that came out recently was the new m1 ipad pro i had austin mann on the podcast and he kind of talked about his thoughts on it but i'd be curious you guys as working in the photography world did you have any thoughts on the new ipad pro especially that liquid retina xdr screen and maybe you could also touch on that superpower as you call it a sebastian i think you discovered by accident while your ipad was close to your jeans or something you found that out as well but talking about the ipad um yeah the ipad pro is really exciting i mean a lot of people see the giant hardware improvements that are happening at and there's very little attention being spent to the camera because who i mean really who photographs with an ipad that's like a question a lot of people it's grandparents for sure yes no shame no shame yeah uh and that's the question a lot of people asked us when we made the ipad version too um but it is for a lot of people the best camera they have and it's a really cool um this was a really cool evolution of that especially because the camera systems on the front of the ipad saw a big change like the new ultra right camera uh was really fun to sort of dig into uh i think you could speak for all of us that we really enjoyed the ipad like just a period of working on it oh absolutely it was wonderful yeah it's a cool device uh and it was fun and fun to finally jump from the iphone to work on something like a little bigger but yeah that superpower is really interesting so for those that don't know your iphone if you look at it um as camera lenses stick out a little bit and uh the module is a certain thickness uh it it physically cannot fit into an eye like people hate the camera bump right they cannot make that any smaller to get that kind of quality from it um and the ipad has kind of an older camera that has different considerations like they they fit it in a much thinner body and that camera is designed in such a way that it can focus a lot closer to things so if you hold something up to your iphone you'll notice sometimes it's too close it just gets blurry like your iphone can't focus on it anymore if you it's within a few inches um the ipad doesn't quite have that problem you can get really close to stuff with your ipad so it has kind of like an inadvertent microscope mode so you can it's like quite a microscope like you won't see blood cells you know it's like ant-man style yeah right and then macro photography sound so there's like a little macro superpower and um because we were i was playing with halide's um so it has manual focus control you can set it to the minimum focus distance uh kind of like found out about that i was like oh this is this is a good reason to whip out the ipad it's like pictures of small things with a very large device and i'll put a link to the article but some of the images you got some of those macro images if we have photographers listening it's a you know macro close-up images they look incredible you know pretty surprising coming from an ipad camera yeah absolutely they also announced at wwdc they're going to have an api to check the minimum focus distance of a particular lens so previously you wouldn't know how close you can focus so it makes you think that like maybe this was deliberate or or maybe it's planning for things to come so yeah now that you mentioned wwdc we just had their keynote as we're recording on june 7th and they announced new changes to all the operating systems and one of the features that's coming to ios 15 is the ability to see exif data and i'll let you guys the professionals explain maybe what that is but in addition to that were there any other features that you as developers or just as users were excited to hear from the keynote uh so exif is uh it's like the extra metadata that's attached to a photo of not just the time you took the photo but you can tag you know the latitude and longitude or where it was taken the configuration of your camera like the shutter speed the aperture all that and then all sorts of other things like what was the white balance setting so it's all this useful data especially as you're if you're like in an editor um like lightroom you can actually say okay show me all the photos that we're taking at this location with this particular lens setting so it's really good for combing through your photo library and it's kind of a nerdy photographer feature really like i bet your parents have never heard of this yeah and don't care in the least bit but it's very interesting to see in the first party camera and we're seeing that there's a way that you can filter photos in the first party photos app based on which app was used to capture it and that's going to be huge for us because we do have like we add a smart or not a smart album but a raw album so we kind of help out users because when they take a photo with halide it's very different than if you're in a bar taking photos like hey you know so you know you you go home and you're like okay what were all these gorgeous photos wait why are all these photos of me in a bar no um so it's uh because we're there yeah that sounds like wwe exactly uh and so it's going to be really helpful to filter out photos there and uh it's really cool to see them embracing more pro photographer workflows uh in that uh in the first party apps and also just i guess ipads growing up a little bit yeah i don't know if there's anything else you folks are excited about i think on the like the notification side of things i really enjoyed it they're improving things there and i think the live text thing is really cool so for those that haven't seen it now their iphone can detect text in in both i think live camera mode but also in still photos you can search through it or even copy and paste text from photos which i think we'll have to see we haven't looked through it yet but maybe it's something we can even have in our app which is cool now so one of the other changes they announced later in the keynote was app store changes and features for developers one of the things that developers can do in ios 15 is create different app icons and use different screen shots and surface those to users on criteria that you as the developer set so if you want to target a specific demographic or age group or location you can actually have a custom app icon when they see it in the app store as opposed to someone else and you can customize the different screenshots you guys only have had a day as we record to think about these things but is that something that interests you or you might do because i know you also got some heat about an app icon thing recently as well but talk to me about that feature for one demographic we could just be like not face tuned don't download like we can't make you look better yeah exactly maybe clarify things yeah exactly really upfront about that so who who is the who's the marketing uh like person of the three of you in this company okay yeah i'm also responsible for the icon um furrow's worth like the icon the icon thing was a good problem yeah the storm in the c-cup that happened was we uh i designed a rainbow icon with litter for pride and we made that our icon in the app store and it's one of the icons if you use halide you can we we offer a number of different icons you can use to customize the app with so if you want to look at the different way in your home screen previously it was all very pro and very camera so it was all silvers and blacks and you know not no color really uh so we added this friday icon it's our first pride icon for pride month which it is and uh you're right yeah it's awesome uh and uh we released as an update and i think our update notes that then wrote was it's a pride update that's it that's the update we got some bug fixes and other small things there are my faces in there as well yes yeah the usual minor enhancements as well of course uh and some some people just decided to troll and send like one star reviews they're like stay in your lane and all that kind of stuff uh but fortunately we feel pretty simple about our own stance on that yeah i mean we don't i don't care to you don't have to be our customer yeah like if you don't support equal rights that's funny i think we don't support your money exactly we don't want your money yeah so that's fine at the end of the day i mean that happens on instagram sometimes too i mean i think we've been pretty outspoken about our beliefs and equality and basic stuff and right if someone has something to say about it we we happily say unsubscribe subscribe now um subscribe it'll be fun to see what the possibilities are but one of the things we don't do as it is is like have analytics in the app or do a b testing or anything like that because we feel like a camera shoot basically the most private thing you have because you take photos of your whole life with it and like we don't love your photos we don't collect your data we don't look at how you use the app we do nothing with a b testing so that also frees up our time to actually build like features instead of looking at data every day like maybe we can optimize just 0.02 so yeah the most notorious example of that is it's a very google versus apple approach right yeah google is known very much for having a data-driven approach to product development like the most famous example is they weren't sure what color the link adwords should be a blue okay so they actually tested 40 or so shades of blue and decided which everyone gets the most clicks that's the shade of color that we want and that's one approach that we don't take if we just pick a color and move on so yeah we're very much uh that we're very much in the apple uh kind of camp of product development for sure now one of the things i think sebastian you were tweeting about this but an idea for reviews app reviews and i get this a little bit on the podcast side because people leave reviews and you really have no control right now to do anything with them i mean you can report a review but people just leave one star reviews and on apps podcasts whatever and you have the suggestion of maybe only allow paying customers to actually leave a review i thought that was a great idea but maybe you could explain that a little bit yeah so it kind of stems from when we were a paid app which is funny when we launched people like voters still paid apps out there if there's a paid app you cannot leave a review unless you buy it and for free apps of course that's that's a little different but i feel like one of the things we ran into and this is kind of a continuing struggle with us is we are free to download but we're not a free app we don't have like we have a trial period but it requires you to start a subscription basically like you can cancel before the trial period is over but that's just the way apple implements trials that's yeah that's just how it works um so some people download the app even though we put in all caps on our app store description like hey it's a paid app you have to pay to use a halide um they just download it and they delete it but then they leave a one star review saying like oh it's it's it's a scam they ask you for money before unlocking the camera and it's like no that's the point that works with design and i wish we could make that really clear i honestly wish it applied a way to take a box and it doesn't say you know it just has a big price underneath that says like require subscription or something like that and if you have an app like that and the app review could very easily look at this and say like go through your app and see that it requires you to unlock it before using it uh it would be fairly great to have a feature like that that limits reviews to people that have either gotten a subscription or a one-time purchase and it could even help with like scam apps that usually also do this and they throw up a paywall before you even use it so just an idea yeah for sure and so also in regards to the app store obviously there was a big epic games versus apple case and all that but i've had other developers on the show i had paulka fossus from audio hijack and different developers have different ideas about should the app store should the iphone specifically and ipad be open should the operating system be as such where you can install apps outside the app store maybe it's for financial reasons so the developer doesn't have to pay the cut to apple for every purchase or because you want to do features that aren't allowed because you being in the app store requires you know you have to follow all the api rules and things like that you just said god so well maybe you've already answered it with that but is that something sorry no no it's good is that something that you would either want the ability to sell your app and allow iphone users to install it outside of the app store or do you feel like the app store and the cut that apple takes and everything is all good and fair and good as is what do you guys think is this one of those like the tweets that i say are do not represent my employer um i would say i like rules some of them i like security i like reasons i think for a lot there are there are a lot of reasons that apple has implemented some of the things that they have and i feel like they following apis for instance and not utilizing like private apis protect me as a user and protect our app so from liability i don't want that i don't want to create a vulnerability where someone can take a phone and retrieve information that you know i have you know coerced or utilized my customers information to do something incorrectly i don't want that responsibility i think a customer's information is belongs to them so i wouldn't want to accidentally do that by thinking i'm more creative or getting around an api um yeah i guess the financial stuff i i'm not educated enough on the topic i would say i know that's the go-to response so i'll let these guys weigh in on that sure so i'd say that uh as far as like there's the alternate app stores thing and the side loading thing like i'm just thinking about how and i was telling someone like a few years ago my dad who has a mac got malware he clicked the first search results in google for java se6 update and it turned out it was malware that would change it only changes default search engine but i had to go in there and unlock it and so the mac is like supposed to be this bastion of like a safe os and ios is better but i think if you allow side loading you're going to get some shenanigans like that right so if you want to be tech support for my parents and that's great um as far as a business owner i think that for us there's this in the app store there's a level of trust from the users that make them impulsively download stuff whether or not they read that it costs money they're just like yeah what's gonna happen and so that kind of like frictionless experience that comes from what apple provides they provide a very clean storefront um and i mean that is in like the the floors are swept uh has really nice lighting you go in there and you're like yeah i want to download an app and so that's you know we're paying a cut to apple for that and in my opinion i think that they earn their keep um it's also nice that because a portion of our users are subscription-based we're gonna be paying 15 after a year so that's awesome i mean i would never turn down more money like if you want to give me 100 that's cool i'm not gonna but as far as like what's fair like i'm i don't have a big problem with what they're offering and the curation is amazing um on the editorial side yeah i think um as like a small developer and obviously we're privileged in this because apple has has picked like one of our apps spectre is like the app of the year in 2019 and they that's their editorial stories like feature our apps um we like again like my personal opinion is i feel like we we get what we pay for um we do get a lot out of that cut um i worked when i moved to san francisco about a decade ago i worked at this startup called double twist i made android apps and i exclusively shipped apps on the play store and uh that is still the same in terms of design like it has basically not changed in 10 years and apple has worldwide editorial teams they feature in the apps and like our app is not like didn't have subscriptions they didn't have some sort of like we knew it wasn't gonna make apple like a ton of money and yet they picked it as like the app of the year it seems like there is some editorial integrity there they there are a lot of people at apple that do care about this stuff in the end is it a trillion dollar company that cares about its bottom line yes obviously like that determines the politics that's what you see in these like lawsuits um but as a small developer i feel like we get a pretty like a pretty fair deal um and like ben said like we'll never turn down more of a cut and like more money uh but for me like i really like the security and convenience the app store offers and um we've have quite a few complaints it's gotten a lot better over the years too so right yeah right and i think it's interesting that you said that like you feel like you get uh your money's worth i think that maybe for some small indie developers that haven't experienced some of the success and the exposure um to their apps from the app store or the recognition i think that perhaps like if this cut were to stay the same that maybe apple needs to be better about finding you know some um developers who are building apps that maybe aren't as pedigreed as these gentlemen here um so i think you know uh sebastian obviously has like a high profile and highly respected as it's been and i think it sort of didn't make it easy for them but it made it easier for apple to find them and maybe apple needs you know you with that in mind um that you know doing a better job of finding some of developers that don't have as big of a reputation well let's look to the future either as you're comfortable saying i want you to give away any secrets that you guys are working on but as far as from the software side or maybe hardware that you'd like to see apple release in the future maybe it's ar vr headset something you would make for that what are you guys excited for about the future either with apple's hardware and software or your own apps i hope they release another iphone it's like well yeah as far as like future plans we're always like famously mom about like what we're working on but i think i remember it was so funny my mom was visiting when we launched halide like me and ben were basically launching out of my kitchen in san francisco before it was four years ago and she said aren't there a lot of camera apps already and i thought at that point it was just getting started like the cameras were just about getting good enough um i think at this point we're getting to a point where cameras are starting to enter really exciting territory and it's not just that they can take pictures but it's sensing and being sensors of the world and enabling all the applications that that enables with all the computational magic is really really cool like when we got to build spectre we got to do things that normally would take setting up like a tripod knowing tons of things about photography and like calculating your exposure and like doing all this stuff and thanks to the magic of like how powerful these little devices are now and all the computational magic we can make something like that accessible to anyone and that's kind of the feature we're looking at like making a lot of photographic things kind of magic and work through the advanced technology that's in these things it's really exciting and i don't know exactly what apple has in store for it but it's going to be really cool to kind of roll with the punches and play with whatever's coming out so well one other thing is that also a nice thing about us now moving to subscriptions is that we can now support certain things like anything we have such a wider field to play with with our ideas stuff that has ongoing costs that can require the cloud or whatever uh so it's gonna be really fun thinking like you know we could pull that off let me run the numbers yeah we could do that yeah so i'll say um it's going to be fun doing stuff a little more than just camera that direct press a button to capture kind of stuff and that's that's a hint right there yeah yeah that's the scoop that's the same that's the scoop yeah that's scoop uh yeah all right well for my last question i'm just curious what is your daily driver each of you i mean you guys are all into photography you make these camera apps are you all 12 pro max people have one of you got the mini what's your daily driver i have the 12 pro top pro so i have a reputation of losing phones so i thought you know i'll go cheap yeah 12 pro i have a 12 pro max uh i did the 12 mini for a little bit i really missed the telephoto lens like i thought like oh i won't be able to live without prora i can live without pro raw i kind of like the old raw a lot because it's it's hard to work with but it's also really aesthetic it has a grain and i don't know i like it but the telephoto lens i really miss it so i hope it's not happening but i hope the next iphone has like is tiny and has a telephoto lens they're just gonna rev physics yeah yeah physics they need to fix physics or just you know cover the entire back of it with lenses but i'm like super happy so it's kind of like a suction cup like an octopus tentacle yeah stick it to your hands kind of like a range a stove you know what i mean just have all these yeah exactly photoshop is like evergreen i feel like little pots and pans on yes yeah so that's our daily drivers right now and then apart from that when i take like sometimes i use like a like a film camera if i i'm like really like done with the iphone photography for a little bit uh it's nice to get back to the basics very cool well thank you guys so much for joining us on the apple insider podcast obviously we'll point people to halide inspector your apps in the app store anywhere else that you would point people to to learn more about lux lux.camera it's actually a domain name camera really luxe.camera we write articles on there about photography and whenever new stuff comes out like when a new ipod came out we dug into the cameras and found our little surprises and superpowers so anytime something like happens in iphone or ipad and land we do a little write-up and if you're new to photography and you want to sign up for halide there is a course that you can take online that you just go to the membership screen settings screen and you can subscribe and learn some cool stuff very cool we'll put all those links in show notes listeners you can check them out there and learn more about lux.camera should try that out and all the apps will be there as well thanks for joining us youwelcome to the apple insider podcast today we have a special interview episode with the team from the makers of halide popular app for the iphone and now ipad you can hear talk about their app the app store and whatever else we get to we have all three members which is very exciting first of all sebastian de with has joined us thanks for joining us sebastian good to be here and from your twitter bio i gathered you're a designer photographer and motorcycle person i don't know the exact term for motorcycle lure motorcycle extraordinaire whatever that list whatever works yeah i'm i'm fine with anything very good and i also saw that you used to work for apple is that correct on some of the design of mobile me and icloud yes correct oh very cool so that's sebastian to with we also have ben sandovsky he used to be the lead twitter ios developer he helped really launch the app for the iphone the twitter app there how's it going ben good good yeah thanks for having me and i am correct you used to work for twitter and i was reading in on your website that when you joined twitter you could fit the entire team around one large lunch table and then shortly after you left the company it was over 3 500 employees does that sound about right sounds about right i think it was like a thousand engineers and uh i was a second ios developer so uh we we uh acquired tweety and so yeah i didn't build it myself but to help scale out the team over the time while i was there so yeah awesome and finally we have rebecca slatkin i would say you're an ios developer extraordinaire i saw you know many places you've worked including an adjunct professor at syracuse university so thanks for being here rebecca of course thanks for having me so my first question is you guys have a company together and obviously you're all in the same world ios developers and all that kind of stuff but how did you actually find each other and decide to start a company together see well originally uh after twitter i wasn't quite sure what i wanted to work on next so i did a bunch of different things uh and i kept returning to well i want to do computer graphics and i'm getting really into photography and so i thought about building like a side app to learn computer graphics uh and scratch this itch it would be like a manual photography app and so i started building it and it was an incredibly ugly but functional app uh like okay cool so now i just have to spend 20 or 30 years learning to be a designer or i could find someone else via of all places twitter uh and who uh was also really into photography and so we were mutual follows and so i slid into the dms and i was up living in san francisco at the time uh and uh so was i and so there was a coffee shop halfway in between and you know that first nervous coffee meeting and then um yeah and they're like okay cool that sounds like a great uh idea and uh next thing you know we were shipping halide 1.0 that's awesome rebecca how did you find this team and become a part of it i hunted them down i would say ben and i became mutual friends um through twitter i loved his blog and as an ios developer it was nice to find someone with higher level engineering principles that i agreed with so looking beyond the scope of like the basic implementation of ios development uh ben seemed to really have a good understanding of um higher level architecture and um we became friends with twitter i think you know witty tweets back and forth mostly from ben we met up um like most people at uh wwdc drunkenly and became fast friends we have a hometown connection uh i think we our first discussion was over uh larping at wpi um so the uh what is that it's the live action plan yeah the live action role playing uh that happens at his college uh that i was familiar with from watching and uh yeah i think we used to i worked for a company based out here in san francisco um so i'd come out here a lot and i would you know i'd meet up with ben and his wife and then sebastian and um i don't know eventually right yeah they were like come work for us yeah at the beginning of a pandemic yeah right it's amazing a lot actually happened in that year in addition to the pandemic you know so pretty wild so you guys have one of the most popular photography and camera apps i'd be curious what you actually refer to it as you had 1.0 and just recently released 2.0 was a big update and now for ipad and maybe if you could kind of give us an idea maybe if our listeners had never heard of halide why would someone want this secondary camera app as opposed to just the built-in camera app and what makes it unique there is an incredibly good camera app built into your iphone uh it's really really great and me and ben loved like increasingly the kind of photos that our iphones were producing while we were lugging around these extremely heavy big cameras with all these buttons and gears and dials on them and while it's great to have all those buttons and gears and dials um it doesn't necessarily translate like it sometimes it can translate to a better photo but definitely not to a better photo taking experience and when ben contacted me apple uh it was around wwc as well apple just announced that they were going to expose some of those dials to developers and there were definitely already apps out there that had controls like camera controls basically um but they were all really complex much like those cameras like if you looked at them and you just gave them to someone they were very intimidating and we felt like there wasn't really a middle ground between the apple camera app or if you tap on something it immediately changes both the focus and the exposure and like it's very it's very very basic and very user friendly obviously and like just something that looks like um if anyone has seen the chernobyl hbo mini series there's this control room and it has 650 thousand buttons that are just unlabeled and little dials and everything it kind of looks like that and like we didn't want that you know people just learn about screaming because like it intimidated me to see all those buttons and i'm into photography so like something kind of approaches the middle ground of it and that is kind of what highlight is it's something that can give you a bit more control over your camera because the cameras are getting really good on your iphone but it's not going to immediately overwhelm you it might even help you learn a little bit about photography so when the iphone 12 came out i believe one of the big features was pro raw meaning that you can now use a raw type format directly on the iphone and you have access to that and halide was one of the you know early apps to adopt that i think you guys actually had a long article about explaining what what raw is which is complicated in itself but it's a great article i'll include that link in the show notes but when that came out pro raw then you also updated your app to 2.0 so what was the big change or what were the big feature updates maybe was pro raw but that also came to 2.0 of halide so i think that uh we launched halide in 2017 and you put something out in the world when it's just built by two people you're like okay this seems like this is right okay cool and then you get into a lot of hands and they really quickly are like okay what wait oh well okay that's good and so you know it was uh i would say the 2.0 wasn't like we totally threw everything out but it's like okay let's rethink how the interface works let's uh rethink like from using the app we tend to reach for one particular control more often and also the hardware was getting better around like being able to do auto exposure so is this sort of like resetting certain assumptions so we started thinking about that like a year and a half into halide and we shipped it free three and a half years later so it was really uh that was a long time coming and i think that then prora also speaks to apple's prioritization of the camera systems and how they're also rethinking what professional photography looks like on the iphone like we launched with regular raw which is way more of an advanced concept despite the name than prora and so it was a chance for us to reset ui expectations and then it made it also on a technical level it was easier to integrate pro raw like you know they launched like a few weeks before christmas and so we were able to get it up pretty quickly um so yeah it's just a number of different things but um to your point about the article i think that what's also interesting from us is trying to approach these advanced photography concepts and make them a little more approachable to like our parents uh i would say pro might be not quite there yet but looking forward where we're gonna be in a few years and like we really want to invest more and like teaching people about photography and sort of like graduating beyond this very you know first party camera where just press a button it does everything for you like how do we get people to learn more advanced or concepts yeah cool so one of the other changes with halide 2.0 was your guys's pricing structure and i think now in 2021 people understand what they're paying for in a subscription you know a developer works on an app ongoing you know whether you buy it with one cost and then you have it forever or you have a subscription model so people i think understand more but it's still kind of a barrier for some people they're averse to subscriptions but you guys went to that pricing model with halide 2.0 and i'd love to talk about the morning of launch and what kind of happened there with your upgrade pricing and all that in a moment but tell me what the internal conversations were like when you were discussing should we go to subscription should we stick with one time purchase how did that all go we still do offer one-time purchases yeah you still do you still do yeah yeah yeah that was an interesting one we're coming off a thing that a lot of developers run into uh if you were to look at a chart of the lifetime of your app most people uh when they launch the app you get a big spike and after that it goes down and you kind of get turned into this ambient place where you never quite get that spike again that spike obviously cannot sustain the development of your app forever so we had been making highlight for three years we sold it once and people were getting free updates for years and while that's a great deal for our users and we totally wanted people to have free updates forever we at some point we can keep working on it without doing a paid update we wanted to do a big update and we also wanted to charge for it um so then there was a question how were we going to do this it was rather challenging there were a few different options and all of them seemed really difficult because we obviously are in the app store the app store limits certain things like you cannot do a paid update for instance if people already have the app you cannot make a second paid app for a lower price as an update for the existing users um but there are make an entirely different app and then you have to buy that one exactly and then we would have two halides in the app store and then people would be like i bought the other halide and you're not updating it for some reason because it would just be really confusing and really problematic so we thought okay we're just going to make a new update and it's going to be an update to the existing app so everybody's going to get the update but then we thought how what's going to happen to people that already have the app right and after a lot of deliberation we thought oh like we definitely don't want people to happen is it's a camera app they go to the beach or it's beautiful sunset they open the app and it says congratulations here's highlight v2 uh you can't use it unless you pay right not a good experience yeah not a great experience we never want people to have that experience so we uh looked at a couple different options like in-app purchases whatever but it would always run into that problem of continuity um so in the end we thought okay well there's a clear trade-off here between our users and our bottom line like money basically and we're like well i guess we're just gonna give the whole update away for free to everybody that already had uses halide and then everybody who's new to halide they get the option to subscribe um or to do a one-time purchase and um we launched that and we were really happy with the the idea and i think when we talked to a lot of people were like that's beyond fair it seems like a really great solution and then um and then we launched so there was a bug yeah i will say though about deciding um how you wanted to approach it or how you wanted to do right by your mark 1 users is we had a lot of internal discussions about what we would want as users what seemed fair to us we even thought about companies outside of the app store that did right by their customers for instance like having an easy return policy and um what positive experience would we've had and we sort of applied that to our pricing and our implementation it's so interesting too because i don't know your all's ages but when i was buying software as a teenager there were big boxes you would go to a store and you would spend 60 to 80 on a box and you never got updates you know if there was a new version of microsoft office or whatever other app you had to spend a whole another eighty dollars when that came out and so it's interesting how that has changed over time but on the morning you guys were gonna launch 2.0 one of the things you had implemented was if you had previously purchased halide 1.0 that you those users would be able to upgrade for a certain amount of time or for free they would get the upgrade for free and you had some press releases about to go out at 9 00 a.m on launch day and you discovered a bug i think was at seven something in the morning so less than two hours before it's going to launch publicly that that upgrade feature was not working and that whole swath of customers that had already purchased your app were going to be shown that they could upgrade for free and not be able to and that's a serious bug talk to me about that moment of realization and and how that next hour and a half went i should check my heart rate right now that morning especially as the the the one higher where my real only responsibility was subscriptions it was um like i have one job you had one job when two people touch the same code base and they read the same documentation and read it wrong right like get the docs wrong once for me or whatever right yeah um yeah you read you need to read the small print and ultimately it was um a dev environment change that we didn't anticipate and i was on the east coast so i was dressed at least and i had food which made you know i wasn't dry heaving like ben but uh we i been it was nice to see ben um you know everyone stayed calm and we just cared about fixing the bug and i think we had to really we wanted to test it with people who had previously purchased halide and i think we learned all that morning of which one of our friends had never downloaded it because we really needed to like reach out to friends who hadn't upgraded so but they needed to be previous owners and learning like my parents or like my brother didn't have halide was pretty insulting but yeah ben sort of took the reigns and you know i i remember tweeting or dming people on twitter hey hey hey hey could you test something for me real quick like yeah so the moral is have a twitter account and uh slide into dms a lot and ask for qa from friends right so but the m sliding has been paying off for ben for a while yeah yeah yeah yeah it's your top scale what did save us too is that we had thought i did implement a hidden debug menu that had our receipt information and display so we had been using it internally and ben was smart and made it actually an endpoint so our friends could easily send it to us so we could actually see what was going on that really helped narrow the problem and that's why i think we were able to fix it so quickly as we had made it accessible secretly to people yeah so what ended up happening uh just to clarify people too is like oh like if your release goes out like it goes out before you're officially launching like how does that happen exactly if you want to coordinate an app launch one of the big things you want to do is you work with press like apple insider for instance we send people our our app and some information ahead of time and then we're like we're going to release at nine and before then we're not going to talk about it so that the press also gets an exclusive moment to to scoop it sort of to like talk about it first um and then we flip the switch for other band flips to switch in the app store that it becomes available for sale and we do that a few hours before that what's called an embargo like the silent period so the app store has a chance to update sometimes it takes a really long time we've had updates that actually took like half a day to show up and then there's all this press and people like where's the update um so we started noticing on our twitter account which we could not public like you know do a big announcement from before it was out that people were replying to us like hey what the bleep what is this i paid for this app and i can't take photos so it was suddenly like one two ten a hundred replies oh and we had a really big inbox full of stuff so we we really like went through quickly unfortunately also we managed right i worked with really talented people that managed to fix it but also apple worked with us to get a quick fix out and i think it was by nine right by nine o'clock fixed fortunately that's amazing yeah kudos too that's awesome teamwork from the three of you yeah yeah so one of the new devices that came out recently was the new m1 ipad pro i had austin mann on the podcast and he kind of talked about his thoughts on it but i'd be curious you guys as working in the photography world did you have any thoughts on the new ipad pro especially that liquid retina xdr screen and maybe you could also touch on that superpower as you call it a sebastian i think you discovered by accident while your ipad was close to your jeans or something you found that out as well but talking about the ipad um yeah the ipad pro is really exciting i mean a lot of people see the giant hardware improvements that are happening at and there's very little attention being spent to the camera because who i mean really who photographs with an ipad that's like a question a lot of people it's grandparents for sure yes no shame no shame yeah uh and that's the question a lot of people asked us when we made the ipad version too um but it is for a lot of people the best camera they have and it's a really cool um this was a really cool evolution of that especially because the camera systems on the front of the ipad saw a big change like the new ultra right camera uh was really fun to sort of dig into uh i think you could speak for all of us that we really enjoyed the ipad like just a period of working on it oh absolutely it was wonderful yeah it's a cool device uh and it was fun and fun to finally jump from the iphone to work on something like a little bigger but yeah that superpower is really interesting so for those that don't know your iphone if you look at it um as camera lenses stick out a little bit and uh the module is a certain thickness uh it it physically cannot fit into an eye like people hate the camera bump right they cannot make that any smaller to get that kind of quality from it um and the ipad has kind of an older camera that has different considerations like they they fit it in a much thinner body and that camera is designed in such a way that it can focus a lot closer to things so if you hold something up to your iphone you'll notice sometimes it's too close it just gets blurry like your iphone can't focus on it anymore if you it's within a few inches um the ipad doesn't quite have that problem you can get really close to stuff with your ipad so it has kind of like an inadvertent microscope mode so you can it's like quite a microscope like you won't see blood cells you know it's like ant-man style yeah right and then macro photography sound so there's like a little macro superpower and um because we were i was playing with halide's um so it has manual focus control you can set it to the minimum focus distance uh kind of like found out about that i was like oh this is this is a good reason to whip out the ipad it's like pictures of small things with a very large device and i'll put a link to the article but some of the images you got some of those macro images if we have photographers listening it's a you know macro close-up images they look incredible you know pretty surprising coming from an ipad camera yeah absolutely they also announced at wwdc they're going to have an api to check the minimum focus distance of a particular lens so previously you wouldn't know how close you can focus so it makes you think that like maybe this was deliberate or or maybe it's planning for things to come so yeah now that you mentioned wwdc we just had their keynote as we're recording on june 7th and they announced new changes to all the operating systems and one of the features that's coming to ios 15 is the ability to see exif data and i'll let you guys the professionals explain maybe what that is but in addition to that were there any other features that you as developers or just as users were excited to hear from the keynote uh so exif is uh it's like the extra metadata that's attached to a photo of not just the time you took the photo but you can tag you know the latitude and longitude or where it was taken the configuration of your camera like the shutter speed the aperture all that and then all sorts of other things like what was the white balance setting so it's all this useful data especially as you're if you're like in an editor um like lightroom you can actually say okay show me all the photos that we're taking at this location with this particular lens setting so it's really good for combing through your photo library and it's kind of a nerdy photographer feature really like i bet your parents have never heard of this yeah and don't care in the least bit but it's very interesting to see in the first party camera and we're seeing that there's a way that you can filter photos in the first party photos app based on which app was used to capture it and that's going to be huge for us because we do have like we add a smart or not a smart album but a raw album so we kind of help out users because when they take a photo with halide it's very different than if you're in a bar taking photos like hey you know so you know you you go home and you're like okay what were all these gorgeous photos wait why are all these photos of me in a bar no um so it's uh because we're there yeah that sounds like wwe exactly uh and so it's going to be really helpful to filter out photos there and uh it's really cool to see them embracing more pro photographer workflows uh in that uh in the first party apps and also just i guess ipads growing up a little bit yeah i don't know if there's anything else you folks are excited about i think on the like the notification side of things i really enjoyed it they're improving things there and i think the live text thing is really cool so for those that haven't seen it now their iphone can detect text in in both i think live camera mode but also in still photos you can search through it or even copy and paste text from photos which i think we'll have to see we haven't looked through it yet but maybe it's something we can even have in our app which is cool now so one of the other changes they announced later in the keynote was app store changes and features for developers one of the things that developers can do in ios 15 is create different app icons and use different screen shots and surface those to users on criteria that you as the developer set so if you want to target a specific demographic or age group or location you can actually have a custom app icon when they see it in the app store as opposed to someone else and you can customize the different screenshots you guys only have had a day as we record to think about these things but is that something that interests you or you might do because i know you also got some heat about an app icon thing recently as well but talk to me about that feature for one demographic we could just be like not face tuned don't download like we can't make you look better yeah exactly maybe clarify things yeah exactly really upfront about that so who who is the who's the marketing uh like person of the three of you in this company okay yeah i'm also responsible for the icon um furrow's worth like the icon the icon thing was a good problem yeah the storm in the c-cup that happened was we uh i designed a rainbow icon with litter for pride and we made that our icon in the app store and it's one of the icons if you use halide you can we we offer a number of different icons you can use to customize the app with so if you want to look at the different way in your home screen previously it was all very pro and very camera so it was all silvers and blacks and you know not no color really uh so we added this friday icon it's our first pride icon for pride month which it is and uh you're right yeah it's awesome uh and uh we released as an update and i think our update notes that then wrote was it's a pride update that's it that's the update we got some bug fixes and other small things there are my faces in there as well yes yeah the usual minor enhancements as well of course uh and some some people just decided to troll and send like one star reviews they're like stay in your lane and all that kind of stuff uh but fortunately we feel pretty simple about our own stance on that yeah i mean we don't i don't care to you don't have to be our customer yeah like if you don't support equal rights that's funny i think we don't support your money exactly we don't want your money yeah so that's fine at the end of the day i mean that happens on instagram sometimes too i mean i think we've been pretty outspoken about our beliefs and equality and basic stuff and right if someone has something to say about it we we happily say unsubscribe subscribe now um subscribe it'll be fun to see what the possibilities are but one of the things we don't do as it is is like have analytics in the app or do a b testing or anything like that because we feel like a camera shoot basically the most private thing you have because you take photos of your whole life with it and like we don't love your photos we don't collect your data we don't look at how you use the app we do nothing with a b testing so that also frees up our time to actually build like features instead of looking at data every day like maybe we can optimize just 0.02 so yeah the most notorious example of that is it's a very google versus apple approach right yeah google is known very much for having a data-driven approach to product development like the most famous example is they weren't sure what color the link adwords should be a blue okay so they actually tested 40 or so shades of blue and decided which everyone gets the most clicks that's the shade of color that we want and that's one approach that we don't take if we just pick a color and move on so yeah we're very much uh that we're very much in the apple uh kind of camp of product development for sure now one of the things i think sebastian you were tweeting about this but an idea for reviews app reviews and i get this a little bit on the podcast side because people leave reviews and you really have no control right now to do anything with them i mean you can report a review but people just leave one star reviews and on apps podcasts whatever and you have the suggestion of maybe only allow paying customers to actually leave a review i thought that was a great idea but maybe you could explain that a little bit yeah so it kind of stems from when we were a paid app which is funny when we launched people like voters still paid apps out there if there's a paid app you cannot leave a review unless you buy it and for free apps of course that's that's a little different but i feel like one of the things we ran into and this is kind of a continuing struggle with us is we are free to download but we're not a free app we don't have like we have a trial period but it requires you to start a subscription basically like you can cancel before the trial period is over but that's just the way apple implements trials that's yeah that's just how it works um so some people download the app even though we put in all caps on our app store description like hey it's a paid app you have to pay to use a halide um they just download it and they delete it but then they leave a one star review saying like oh it's it's it's a scam they ask you for money before unlocking the camera and it's like no that's the point that works with design and i wish we could make that really clear i honestly wish it applied a way to take a box and it doesn't say you know it just has a big price underneath that says like require subscription or something like that and if you have an app like that and the app review could very easily look at this and say like go through your app and see that it requires you to unlock it before using it uh it would be fairly great to have a feature like that that limits reviews to people that have either gotten a subscription or a one-time purchase and it could even help with like scam apps that usually also do this and they throw up a paywall before you even use it so just an idea yeah for sure and so also in regards to the app store obviously there was a big epic games versus apple case and all that but i've had other developers on the show i had paulka fossus from audio hijack and different developers have different ideas about should the app store should the iphone specifically and ipad be open should the operating system be as such where you can install apps outside the app store maybe it's for financial reasons so the developer doesn't have to pay the cut to apple for every purchase or because you want to do features that aren't allowed because you being in the app store requires you know you have to follow all the api rules and things like that you just said god so well maybe you've already answered it with that but is that something sorry no no it's good is that something that you would either want the ability to sell your app and allow iphone users to install it outside of the app store or do you feel like the app store and the cut that apple takes and everything is all good and fair and good as is what do you guys think is this one of those like the tweets that i say are do not represent my employer um i would say i like rules some of them i like security i like reasons i think for a lot there are there are a lot of reasons that apple has implemented some of the things that they have and i feel like they following apis for instance and not utilizing like private apis protect me as a user and protect our app so from liability i don't want that i don't want to create a vulnerability where someone can take a phone and retrieve information that you know i have you know coerced or utilized my customers information to do something incorrectly i don't want that responsibility i think a customer's information is belongs to them so i wouldn't want to accidentally do that by thinking i'm more creative or getting around an api um yeah i guess the financial stuff i i'm not educated enough on the topic i would say i know that's the go-to response so i'll let these guys weigh in on that sure so i'd say that uh as far as like there's the alternate app stores thing and the side loading thing like i'm just thinking about how and i was telling someone like a few years ago my dad who has a mac got malware he clicked the first search results in google for java se6 update and it turned out it was malware that would change it only changes default search engine but i had to go in there and unlock it and so the mac is like supposed to be this bastion of like a safe os and ios is better but i think if you allow side loading you're going to get some shenanigans like that right so if you want to be tech support for my parents and that's great um as far as a business owner i think that for us there's this in the app store there's a level of trust from the users that make them impulsively download stuff whether or not they read that it costs money they're just like yeah what's gonna happen and so that kind of like frictionless experience that comes from what apple provides they provide a very clean storefront um and i mean that is in like the the floors are swept uh has really nice lighting you go in there and you're like yeah i want to download an app and so that's you know we're paying a cut to apple for that and in my opinion i think that they earn their keep um it's also nice that because a portion of our users are subscription-based we're gonna be paying 15 after a year so that's awesome i mean i would never turn down more money like if you want to give me 100 that's cool i'm not gonna but as far as like what's fair like i'm i don't have a big problem with what they're offering and the curation is amazing um on the editorial side yeah i think um as like a small developer and obviously we're privileged in this because apple has has picked like one of our apps spectre is like the app of the year in 2019 and they that's their editorial stories like feature our apps um we like again like my personal opinion is i feel like we we get what we pay for um we do get a lot out of that cut um i worked when i moved to san francisco about a decade ago i worked at this startup called double twist i made android apps and i exclusively shipped apps on the play store and uh that is still the same in terms of design like it has basically not changed in 10 years and apple has worldwide editorial teams they feature in the apps and like our app is not like didn't have subscriptions they didn't have some sort of like we knew it wasn't gonna make apple like a ton of money and yet they picked it as like the app of the year it seems like there is some editorial integrity there they there are a lot of people at apple that do care about this stuff in the end is it a trillion dollar company that cares about its bottom line yes obviously like that determines the politics that's what you see in these like lawsuits um but as a small developer i feel like we get a pretty like a pretty fair deal um and like ben said like we'll never turn down more of a cut and like more money uh but for me like i really like the security and convenience the app store offers and um we've have quite a few complaints it's gotten a lot better over the years too so right yeah right and i think it's interesting that you said that like you feel like you get uh your money's worth i think that maybe for some small indie developers that haven't experienced some of the success and the exposure um to their apps from the app store or the recognition i think that perhaps like if this cut were to stay the same that maybe apple needs to be better about finding you know some um developers who are building apps that maybe aren't as pedigreed as these gentlemen here um so i think you know uh sebastian obviously has like a high profile and highly respected as it's been and i think it sort of didn't make it easy for them but it made it easier for apple to find them and maybe apple needs you know you with that in mind um that you know doing a better job of finding some of developers that don't have as big of a reputation well let's look to the future either as you're comfortable saying i want you to give away any secrets that you guys are working on but as far as from the software side or maybe hardware that you'd like to see apple release in the future maybe it's ar vr headset something you would make for that what are you guys excited for about the future either with apple's hardware and software or your own apps i hope they release another iphone it's like well yeah as far as like future plans we're always like famously mom about like what we're working on but i think i remember it was so funny my mom was visiting when we launched halide like me and ben were basically launching out of my kitchen in san francisco before it was four years ago and she said aren't there a lot of camera apps already and i thought at that point it was just getting started like the cameras were just about getting good enough um i think at this point we're getting to a point where cameras are starting to enter really exciting territory and it's not just that they can take pictures but it's sensing and being sensors of the world and enabling all the applications that that enables with all the computational magic is really really cool like when we got to build spectre we got to do things that normally would take setting up like a tripod knowing tons of things about photography and like calculating your exposure and like doing all this stuff and thanks to the magic of like how powerful these little devices are now and all the computational magic we can make something like that accessible to anyone and that's kind of the feature we're looking at like making a lot of photographic things kind of magic and work through the advanced technology that's in these things it's really exciting and i don't know exactly what apple has in store for it but it's going to be really cool to kind of roll with the punches and play with whatever's coming out so well one other thing is that also a nice thing about us now moving to subscriptions is that we can now support certain things like anything we have such a wider field to play with with our ideas stuff that has ongoing costs that can require the cloud or whatever uh so it's gonna be really fun thinking like you know we could pull that off let me run the numbers yeah we could do that yeah so i'll say um it's going to be fun doing stuff a little more than just camera that direct press a button to capture kind of stuff and that's that's a hint right there yeah yeah that's the scoop that's the same that's the scoop yeah that's scoop uh yeah all right well for my last question i'm just curious what is your daily driver each of you i mean you guys are all into photography you make these camera apps are you all 12 pro max people have one of you got the mini what's your daily driver i have the 12 pro top pro so i have a reputation of losing phones so i thought you know i'll go cheap yeah 12 pro i have a 12 pro max uh i did the 12 mini for a little bit i really missed the telephoto lens like i thought like oh i won't be able to live without prora i can live without pro raw i kind of like the old raw a lot because it's it's hard to work with but it's also really aesthetic it has a grain and i don't know i like it but the telephoto lens i really miss it so i hope it's not happening but i hope the next iphone has like is tiny and has a telephoto lens they're just gonna rev physics yeah yeah physics they need to fix physics or just you know cover the entire back of it with lenses but i'm like super happy so it's kind of like a suction cup like an octopus tentacle yeah stick it to your hands kind of like a range a stove you know what i mean just have all these yeah exactly photoshop is like evergreen i feel like little pots and pans on yes yeah so that's our daily drivers right now and then apart from that when i take like sometimes i use like a like a film camera if i i'm like really like done with the iphone photography for a little bit uh it's nice to get back to the basics very cool well thank you guys so much for joining us on the apple insider podcast obviously we'll point people to halide inspector your apps in the app store anywhere else that you would point people to to learn more about lux lux.camera it's actually a domain name camera really luxe.camera we write articles on there about photography and whenever new stuff comes out like when a new ipod came out we dug into the cameras and found our little surprises and superpowers so anytime something like happens in iphone or ipad and land we do a little write-up and if you're new to photography and you want to sign up for halide there is a course that you can take online that you just go to the membership screen settings screen and you can subscribe and learn some cool stuff very cool we'll put all those links in show notes listeners you can check them out there and learn more about lux.camera should try that out and all the apps will be there as well thanks for joining us you\n"