The Lawsuit
Apple to pay $18 Million Dollars to settle a class-action lawsuit in California, reports 9to5Mac. The lawsuit accused the tech giant Apple of intentionally cutting down Facetime application on all its older model iPhones. Due to this about 3.6 Million iPhone users will be affected and each of them receives $3 as compensation. And 90% of them will be given their compensation amount through mail or wired electronically.
“The class is defined as all California owners of non-jailbroken Apple iPhone 4 or 4S devices with iOS 6 or earlier operating systems,” according to the report. 30% of the settlement fund will go to the class counsel, while the two original named plaintiffs will each get $7,500.
This lawsuit contains two main witnesses Christina Grace and Ken Potter who are entitled to receive $7,500 each for their participation in the case. And about thirty percent of the settlement fund to go to the class counsel.
According to this lawsuit, Apple as a measure of saving funds has intentionally brokedown Facetime application from its older model iPhones mainly the iPhone 4 and 4S. Since these model iPhones were running on IOS 6 and they couldn’t be upgraded to IOS 7, Apple has cut the Facetime application to save money on updating and maintaining it on their older software versions.
The reason why Apple gave up Facetime on iPhones running an older version of IOS
When Facetime was originally launched in 2010, it used 2 methods of transferring both audio and video between two iPhones and they are
- peer-to-peer standard to directly transfer audio and video between users
- “relay method,” relying on third-party servers from Akami to transfer the data between users.
In 2012, Apple violated patent rights relating to peer-to-peer tech owned by VirnetX, which forced them to depend only on the Relay method of connecting iPhones through Facetime. And later Apple found out a new way to use the peer-to-peer method of transferring audio and video without infringing the patent rights of VirnetX. Since maintaining this technology on all the versions of their software, Apple has cut down Facetime from iPhones that are running on older versions of IOS and therefore forcing their users to file a lawsuit against them.
Also read: Facebook To Merge Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram
