Apple to Pay $18 Million Settlement in Broken FaceTime Lawsuit

Like many corporations, Apple has received a long series of lawsuits. Some of these were attempts to make a quick buck off of old patents, while others were due to significant problems in the user experience. In a recent case, Apple is being challenged for “breaking” its own software with the explicit purpose of forcing users to upgrade.

In February 2017, a woman from California filed a lawsuit, claiming that Apple had intentionally broken the FaceTime app in iOS 6 in order to force users to upgrade to iOS 7.

While the accusation sounds ridiculous on a certain level by itself, a series of emails were discovered that seem to reveal potential implications.

Emails, kept internal, reflected that Apple relied on third-party servers from a company called Akamai for FaceTime services. But as Facetime services grew in usage across the world, fees from Akamai’s costs grew as well. According to the files released in a previous case, this outsourcing cost Apple millions of dollars per month.

Akamai’s software was primarily used from iOS early on, until iOS 7. The iOS 7 update to FaceTime severely reduced the load on Akamai servers and saved them a lot of money. However, older iOS programs were not able to adapt to it. This was further incriminating based on emails discovered where Apple engineer Patrick Gates sent an email asking what the company had done “in April around iOS 6 to reduce relay utilization.”

In response, engineer Gokul Thirumalai said “It was a big user of relay bandwidth. We broke iOS 6, and the only way to get FaceTime working again is to upgrade to iOS 7.”

While forcing an upgrade among Apple devices may seem inconsequential compared to most crimes, Apple users reported that they saw a significant decrease in quality regarding the software in question. At the time of the so-called breaking, more than 80 percent of users had upgraded to iOS 7, meaning that only a much smaller group were affected by this decision.

Three years later, Apple resolved the case by inking an 18 million dollar deal with the second party in hopes of settling the lawsuit. However, none of the plaintiffs involved will be getting much of the payoff. Rather, each member of the case action lawsuit will receive $3 per device as compensation for the inconvenience caused by the broken FaceTime issue.