A class-action lawsuit accuses Apple of scheming to break FaceTime on purpose for iOS 6 in order to force users to upgrade to iOS 7.
While it's true that each time a new iPhone iteration and major iOS version become available, various reports allege that Apple is purposefully crippling older smartphones to force users to upgrade, this time it's more serious.
The class-action lawsuit filed on Thursday, Feb. 2 in California alleges that Apple wanted to force users to upgrade in an effort to cut down costs on a data services deal with Akamai, making older smartphones such as the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4s unusable.
FaceTime Relay
As AppleInsider reports, this new lawsuit stems from another case involving Apple. More specifically, Apple lost a patent infringement lawsuit against VirnetX and a judge ruled that Apple must pay $302.4 million in damages.
That case referred to technology that Apple used for FaceTime video calls. Back in 2012, a jury decided that Apple infringed on VirnetX technology and slapped the iPhone maker with a $368 million fine. The highest amount that a jury awarded to VirnetX was back in February 2016, when Apple was ordered to pay $626 million. Apple was also forced to stop using the technology, so it resorted to an alternative - the deal with Akamai.
As part of that deal, Apple relied on Akamai's servers to rout video calls between FaceTime users though peer-to-peer technology. However, Apple can't rely on that peer-to-peer software anymore.
Apple started pouring increasingly more money into Akamai's service and the new lawsuit now claims that Apple eventually devised a new peer-to-peer technology for FaceTime calls and packed it onto iOS 7. The new technology did not violate any VirnetX technology and no longer relied on Akamai to relay the calls. According to the lawsuit, this was just a scheme to cut down costs by forcing iOS 6 users to upgrade to iOS 7 and use the newer peer-to-peer technology.
Breaking FaceTime On iOS 6 To Cut Costs
However, Apple ran into an unexpected issue: some iOS users were still using iOS 6 instead of upgrading to iOS 7. Consequently, Apple broke FaceTime on iOS 6 in order to force users' hand to upgrade, the lawsuit alleges. The scheme may have affected iPhone 4 and 4s owners the most, as the older hardware would have a tougher time running iOS 7.
Apple allegedly broke FaceTime on iOS 6 back in April 2014. According to the lawsuit, it did so by faking a bug stemming from a certificate that expired earlier than it should have. Because of that bug, iOS users had to upgrade to iOS 7 if they wanted to use FaceTime again.
At the time, Apple acknowledged the issue and said that upgrading to the latest software, which was iOS 7, would resolve it.
The lawsuit even cites an email conversation purportedly proving that Apple intentionally broke FaceTime on iOS 6 because it used a lot of relay bandwidth and it had to do something to get users to upgrade.
