Derrick Downey Jr. built a career on short-form videos documenting his interactions with the squirrels that visit his patio in LA. His Instagram and TikTok accounts each have well over a million followers (myself included) who know well the regular cast of characters: Maxine, Richard, and less frequent but affectionately named visitors like Hoodrat Raymond. Downey treats them to plenty of nuts, custom-built shelters, and trips to the local vet when emergency medical care is needed. It’s delightful and about as wholesome as it gets.

He was looking to spin up a series for YouTube, but he struggled to find a way to capture vertical and horizontal footage simultaneously. Other creators solve for this by using a special rig with two phones or cameras shooting at once, or by cropping the clip to both formats in post-processing. “I tried going out and buying different devices and rigs and gimbals, and additional phones to set up to accommodate for that… but it became too taxing,” he says. “The editing… all of that was too much.” And cropping in post has drawbacks, too: the iPhone camera uses a crop of the full sensor when you record video. Taking a vertical 16:9 crop from the middle of that already-cropped frame means you’re only using a small portion of the total sensor, losing a lot of resolution and limiting your framing options.

Last year, he got the idea to try creating an app to solve the problem. He’s not a software developer, and experimented with ChatGPT to try and vibe-code something. This was unsuccessful, so he put the project to the side. But earlier this year, something told him to try again, he says.

“I went into the code and the camera activated. And I said okay, we possibly got something here.” He did some digging into the iPhone camera’s capabilities to find out what might be possible. Apple’s camera API allows third-party developers to access footage from the entire sensor, which other app developers have taken advantage of in the past. Downey saw an opportunity to use this capability to solve the multiple aspect ratio problem. With this full sensor readout, his app could save horizontal and vertical crops from that original video — all in-camera without losing resolution. Three or four months and a lot of prompt engineering later, he had a working app.