Apple’s Top iOS Engineering Vice President, Henri Lamiraux, Departs After 23 Years

Henri Lamiraux, Apple’s top Vice President of iOS Engineering, has been with Apple for 23 years. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lamiraux has left Apple.

He confirmed his departure to 9To5Mac via email saying that, he retired from Apple a “couple of weeks ago.” Lamiraux decided a short while ago that iOS 7 would be the last version of the operation system that he would contribute to.

Sources inside of Apple’s iOS division have said that Lamiraux was very widely respected and had great talent. His main focus was working on the system apps that come standard on every version of iOS. He also led feature-implementation, frameworks within iOS, bug-fixing processes, and the distribution of new features to customers.

Last fall Apple changed around their executives, most notably, Craig Federighi became Senior Vice President of both iOS and OS X engineering, taking over for Scott Forstall. Lamiraux was Forstall’s right-hand-man, so during the transition his role became more critical.

During this transition period, Bob Mansfield, former Senior Vice President of Technologies, announced his retirement. Only a few months later, Mansfield announced that he would remain at Apple, working on future products and reporting directly to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.

Lamiraux started his career at Apple as a Mac software engineer. In 2005, Lamiraux moved over to the iOS team which made him one of the select few to work on the iPhone from the start.

Apple developers knew Lamiraux very well. During WWDC he would often appear in the developer sessions and videos. Most recently appearing in the keynote address for developers in 2012, following the consumer and media event.

Apple is only a year in to making this executive transition and loosing Lamiraux is a significant loss for them. Although, consumers will probably not see any affect with the departure of  Lamiraux.

Apple is moving strong with the future of iOS under the software engineering power of Craig Federighi and the design power of Jony Ive, and the next versions of iOS and OS X are probably well into development.