The latest court case places Apple and a user who accuses the company of intentionally “malfunctioning” FaceTime on iOS 6, just for financial reasons. The new lawsuit involving Apple has been filed in a California court and is intended to prove that the company intended to force users to upgrade to iOS 7 just to save millions of dollars in making FaceTime available.
FaceTime issues?
The indictment has elaborate contours, but it is simple to understand. FaceTime is one of the most efficient and robust video conferencing service available in the market. When this service was originally released, there were two ways to communicate between devices: the first using peer-to-peer protocols, which allowed the “direct” transfer of audio and video between devices and a second method, which used third-party servers, Specifically Akamai to establish the bridge of communication between these devices. However, due to a process VirnetX, Apple was required to disconnect the first communication method (P2P) communications flowing through only by Akamai servers. The problem with this scenario is that, because of the high number of communications to be processed, Apple was required to bear high monthly costs to keep this service running. As a solution to such a problem, Apple redefined the communications system based on P2P protocols without infringing the patents of the company VirnetX Holding Corp. The problem was with users who still had iOS 6 and whose calls continued to flow through Akamai’s servers. To quickly resolve such a problem, Apple has expired a service security certificate, causing FaceTime to no longer function properly on iOS 6. With this new problem in iOS 6, which Apple categorized as a bug and that would only be fixed with the update for iOS 7, Apple managed to force the upgrade and thus fail to pay for Akamai services.
Evidence that Apple “broke” FaceTime on iOS 6
All this information was obtained from an another process that has been in court before the end of last year, where VirnetX Holding Corp. managed to force Apple to pay 302.4 million dollars for infringement of several patents. Apple has reportedly paid $50 million to Akamai between April and September 2013. There are also documents where Apple employees describe how they managed to “break” FaceTime on iOS 6 And how it would serve Apple to save lots of money. The main proof of this whole new process can be read below and does not leave much room for maneuver for Apple. A question was sent to Apple engineers and asked what had been done to reduce the use of Akamai services. “Hey, guys. I’m looking at the Akamai contract for next year. I understand we did something in April around iOS 6 to reduce relay utilization”. The answer is clear and it shows well what was the solution that the Apple team found to avoid the expense they were having with Akamai and its services. “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”. The evidence seems to leave no doubt that Apple acted deliberately when it disabled FaceTime on iOS 6, forcing the upgrade to version 7, which has left many iPhones with performance issues displeasing users. According to what is being broadcast, it is difficult for the tech giant Apple to escape conviction in this case.
