Judge gives greenlight to class action suit claiming Apple 'broke' FaceTime

A class action lawsuit charging that Apple deliberately "broke" FaceTime on older iPhones can continue, a U.S. District judge has ruled, tossing out an Apple motion to dismiss.

Judge Lucy Koh turned down the motion in a late Friday ruling, according to Reuters, specfically rejecting an Apple argument that the plaintiffs in the case had suffered no financial loss since FaceTime is a free service.

"FaceTime is a 'feature' of the iPhone and thus a component of the iPhone's cost," Koh said in a footnote of her ruling. "Indeed, Apple advertised FaceTime as 'one more thing that makes an iPhone an iPhone.'"

After losing a lawsuit to VirnetX — which claimed FaceTime was violating patents — the company began routing calls through Akamai servers, spending $50 million in one six-month period alone. The plaintiffs in the current case charge that Apple disabled FaceTime on devices running iOS 6 or earlier in April 2014, doing so simply because it was able to create a cheaper alternative to Akamai in iOS 7.

At the time, Apple blamed a "bug" linked to an expired certificate, but subsequently revised its support pages to drop references to it. In emails from the VirnetX suit, Apple engineers said they were aware the company "did something in April around iOS 6 to reduce relay utilization," making direct references to Akamai and users having to upgrade to iOS 7 to get FaceTime back.

Most iPhones and iPads were already on iOS 7 by the time FaceTime stopped working with iOS 6, but 11 percent were still on the old OS — likely because of performance concerns and missing features on older devices.

19 Comments

kennyrogersroasters 2 comments · 7 Years

About 7 years ago

When Apple introduced FaceTime, they also advertised it as being open-source and they hoped the entire industry would adopt it. Guess who never open-sourced it?

fallenjt 4056 comments · 13 Years

kennyrogersroasters said:

When Apple introduced FaceTime, they also advertised it as being open-source and they hoped the entire industry would adopt it. Guess who never open-sourced it?

No, because it will be no longer secured if it's open to Android. I was glad that Apple keep it exclusively to iDevices.

"FaceTime is a 'feature' of the iPhone and thus a component of the iPhone's cost," Koh said in a footnote of her ruling. "Indeed, Apple advertised FaceTime as 'one more thing that makes an iPhone an iPhone.'"

This's how the stupid judge interpreted technology. LOL. FaceTime is not a feature of the iPhone, you moron. It's a feature of the iOS and iOS features got added and removed over time. This is how fcked up US justice system is: if you give someone something free, they may sue you if that doesn't work according to their expectation...as a free stuff...Yeah, how stupid that sounds!

foregoneconclusion 2834 comments · 12 Years

It's true iOS 7 had performance problems on older iPhones, but it's also true that the 7.1 update that provided fixes for that came out before FaceTime stopped working on iOS 6.

jdgaz 406 comments · 9 Years

At some point this judge needs to be investigated. Seems she always sides against apple. Does she own a bunch of google stock? Or maybe she lost her shirt on blackberry and is taking it out on apple.