Apple Goes on Trial for Allegedly Disabling FaceTime on Earlier iPhones
A court has recently decided that Apple should go on trial following complaints that it removed the FaceTime feature on earlier iPhone models.
The Cupertino, California, technology giant initially filed a petition for the court to dismiss a class action lawsuit against it. The lawsuit claimed the company deliberately "broke" the FaceTime communication feature on earlier released iPhones.
However, United States District Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California ruled last week that the case needed to go on trial, according to Reuters.
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In the consumer class action lawsuit filed last February, the complainants' representatives explained that Apple's FaceTime calls were forwarded through two different ways. One was by the typical peer-to-peer mode while the other employed a "relay usage" system with the help of Akamai Technologies Inc.
In late 2012, the complaint explained that up to 95 percent of FaceTime calls were forwarded through a peer-to-peer connection. However, a court found that the said communication method was actually patented to VirnetX. This meant Apple was found infringing on that method.
This ultimately forced Apple to rely on Akamai for most of the FaceTime calls which eventually caused it to "incur multi-million dollar monthly charges" for the sudden surge in the use of Akamai servers.
Apple reportedly came up with a new way to use peer-to-peer connections for FaceTime calls without infringing VirnetX's invention which was introduced in iOS 7.
However, the complainants claimed: "To further reduce its relay usage costs, Apple devised a scheme to force millions of its users — i.e., users running iOS version 6 and earlier — to stop using FaceTime."
Disgruntled consumers also cited "internal emails and sworn testimony" presented during Apple's trial against VirnetX purportedly revealed the company "formulated a plan by which its engineers caused a digital certificate necessary to the operation of FaceTime on iOS 6 or an earlier operating system to prematurely expire."
The complainants maintained that Apple carried on with the new FaceTime scheme despite knowing that the iOS 7 update for early iPhone models such as the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s was "highly problematic because it was essentially incompatible with certain Apple devices."
According to the affected iPhone 4 and 4s users, updating their device to iOS 7 caused their devices to experience several problems such as "slowness, system crashes, erratic behavior and/or the elimination of their ability to use critical functions on their phone."
