Apple sabotaged FaceTime on iOS 6 to force move to iOS 7

Apple allowed a digital certificate to expire prematurely to frustrate FaceTime’s operation on iOS 6, then attributed the incompatibility to a bug. That’s the claim in a lawsuit against Apple, citing emails as evidence.

It is a class action that has been brought in California. Various parties who feel disadvantaged can join these types of cases in order to be eligible for compensation. The claim is that Apple wanted to persuade iOS 6 users to move to iOS 7 in order to save money on a deal with Akamai.

As proof, emails are put forward with internal communication about changes to FaceTime. Those emails were used in a previous case, about Apple’s alleged infringement of VirnetX’s patents with FaceTime. FaceTime initially worked over both p2p and Akamai relay servers. However, Apple had to stop its p2p technology for infringing VirnetX’s patents.

Having FaceTime traffic handled entirely through Akamai’s servers dramatically increased the company’s costs; between April and September 2013, it was $50 million. With iOS 7, Apple switched to self-developed peer-to-peer techniques that did not infringe. The amount of users who were still on iOS 6, and therefore incurring costs at Akamai, would be a problem for Apple.

On April 16, 2014, FaceTime issues began to arise on iOS 6, which Apple attributed to “a bug resulting from a device certificate expiring on that day.” However, in emails, employees spoke of “Apple did something with iOS 6 to reduce relay usage.” Another engineer reported, according to Apple Insider, “We broke iOS 6 and the only way to get FaceTime working again was to upgrade to iOS 7.”

The site notes that the remaining use of iOS 6 could hardly be a cause for concern for Apple, given that as of April 2014, only 11 percent of iOS devices were on version 6. Some of them had an iPhone 4 or iPad 3, on which iOS 7, according to AnandTech, did not run smoothly at the time.