Building precise, dependable software and hardware for the people who rely on it, since 2022.
Deoxy Labs is an independent technology company working from New South Wales, Australia and Texas, USA. We design, build and run our own software and hardware, from apps for iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac and Apple TV to the servers behind them and the circuit boards on our bench.
We started as two people who spent their spare time taking technology apart to understand how it works. That curiosity is still the core of the company. Whether it is a calculator a machinist uses between cuts or a debugging tool that reaches inside a phone, we hold our work to the standard of the people who depend on it.
We are small on purpose. Every product is designed, engineered and supported in house, by the people named on this page.
Deoxy Labs began with Internal Archive, an online community founded by John McAllister that documented the history of Apple prototype hardware and pre-release software. Ky Young joined the team from Australia in August 2021 to look after design and operations, and the two have worked together across the Pacific ever since.
In November 2021, Ky sent John a message one morning: an idea for a company that could change the industry, and an admission that it could not be built alone. John replied before he knew what it was. “I’m in.” He was also the one to suggest starting with software and simple hardware, and growing from there. It is still how we work.
In February 2022 we founded Deoxy Labs, as equal partners. John suggested the name: Deoxy comes from deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, the structure everything else is built on.
Ky trained as a fitter and machinist, and the questions that came up on the workshop floor became Handbook, a reference with more than a hundred tools for machining and fitting. Its assistant, Spectre, runs on servers we own and operate, so the work our users trust us with stays with us. Years of security research led to Blackjack, our debug probe for iPhone, where Ky designed the circuit and wrote the software and John designed the enclosure.
John has always been the one to see what a product could be before it exists. That, and a commitment to helping others, led him to HaloXR II, a scene capture system that gives law enforcement a faster and more accurate record of a scene.
Today we build across software and hardware, for the trades, for public safety and for play. We are still a small team, still independent, and still driven by the same curiosity that brought us together.
Co-founder, Engineering
Ky co-founded Deoxy Labs in 2022 and leads engineering from New South Wales, across software, hardware and security research. A fitter and machinist by trade, Ky built Handbook and Spectre, and designed Blackjack’s circuit and software.
Co-founder, Design
John co-founded Deoxy Labs in 2022 after founding Internal Archive, and leads design from Texas. A hardware designer and the one who turns ideas into products, John designed Blackjack’s enclosure and leads HaloXR II, driven by a commitment to law enforcement and to helping others.
Make it exist first, make it greater later.
An idea proves nothing until it works. We build the first working version as early as we can, on real hardware and in the hands of the people it is for, because a working version answers questions a plan never will.
Then we refine it. In the workshop, a part is roughed out before it is finished: the roughing pass brings it to shape quickly, and the finishing pass brings it to size. Everything we make is built the same way, refined pass by pass until it meets the standard of the people who rely on it.
