In what appears to be quite shocking
news, Apple, the maker of the iPhone has been slapped with a lawsuit that
blames the company for shutting down its FaceTime services for users of its
older hardware in 2014.
According to email evidence, Apple
forced its users to upgrade to the latest version of its iOS operating
system that would eventually deliver a drastic drop in device performance
in order to avoid incurring additional data relay costs of the FaceTime
service.
The lawsuit according to Apple
Insider was filed at U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., and
alleges that Apple intentionally turned off its native video conferencing
app for users who were running iOS 6 on their smartphones to get them to
upgrade to iOS 7 in 2014.
While this may not sound like a big
deal, it was not uncommon to hear from a number of users that iOS 7 did slow
down older devices like the iPhone 4 and 4s, devices which Apple still continued
to sell in markets like India, despite being slow out of the box thanks to
newer software.
According to the same lawsuit, the move
only affected owners of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s. The class also alleges that
Apple did this inorder to avoid additional charges that the company would have
to incur because of the technology used to relay FaceTime calls back between
2010 and 2014.
The
iPhone 4 and 4s were the worst hit with the new iOS 7 software update and ran a
lot smoother with iOS 6.
When Apple launched its FaceTime
service back in 2010, it used two methods to relay the large amounts of
data to make the video calling service possible. The first one was a
peer-to-peer (P2P) technology which would route both audio and data over a
direct connection. The second one was a “relay method” which used Akamai’s
servers to relay the same data.
In order to avoid big bills, Apple came
up with a solution to avoid those charges and included it in iOS 7.0.4. While
iOS 7 did come with some fancy new features and a redesign UI, it was also
heavy on older smartphones like the iPhone 4 and 4s, which meant that the
performance would drop.
Turns out that while many uninformed
users did fall victim to reduced performance, a percentage of those iPhone 4
and 4S users simply refused to update to avoid the problem.
Apple however, was incurring heavy
bills at the time thanks to the chunk of users placing FaceTime calls over
Akamai’s servers.
This is where Apple allegedly put its foot down and
broke the FaceTime app, calling it a bug and forcing those users to upgrade to
iOS 7 (if they wanted FaceTime to work).
With no choice, many had to and this
lead to performance drops on the older iPhone models.
As per Apple’s own statistics as fished
out by Apple Insider, only 11 percent of devices were running iOS 6 back
in April 2014. So it remains to be seen whether all of the above information is
legit. Additionally this whole lawsuit is based on emails obtained that were
allegedly sent across between Apple engineers after the incident took place.
The class action lawsuit, seeks to find
Apple violated California’s unfair competition law. It also seems to be
bordering on a tort termed as ‘trespass to chattels’ which in short, is to do
with interfering with one’s possessions.
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