A federal court has thrown out a Florida-based lawsuit claiming that Apple intentionally broke FaceTime for people with older Apple devices.
The lawsuit is very similar to a class action suit filed in California. Apple settled that lawsuit, related to the iPhone 4 and 4s, in February. Like that case, the Florida case concerned iPhones running iOS 6 and earlier. A Florida court wasn’t won over, however. It tossed out the suit Tuesday, claiming that it is “untimely and must be dismissed.”
The suit claimed that Apple purposely broke FaceTime for older iPhones. It also said Apple “deceptively” described the issue as a software bug, a previous Bloomberg Law article about the case alleged. The suit was filed in the Southern District of Florida.
The issue comes down to Apple’s decision to ditch third-party servers a few years back. Apple previously used servers owned by Akamai Technologies for FaceTime calls. It then switched to using its own servers instead with iOS 7. After this, Apple allowed a security certificate to lapse. This broke FaceTime on devices running iOS 6. Some users considered this to be a calculated effort to push people to upgrade to iOS 7.
Florida court disagrees Apple broke FaceTime
This, inevitably, wound up becoming the basis for class action lawsuits. Apple agreed to settle a California suit in February. Had it not, the case would have gone to an April trial.
The Florida case did not repeat the same trajectory, though. At a time when Apple already has enough to worry about, with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s good news for the company.
Somewhat ironically, this latest case is settled just after a new software update broke FaceTime for customers with older Apple devices. The issue affects devices running iOS 13.4 and macOS 10.15.4 when they attempt to connect with devices running iOS 9.3.5 or iOS 9.3.6 — or vice-versa. At present, there’s no fix.
