Apple agreed to pay $18 million to claimants in a California class-action lawsuit that argued Cupertino broke FaceTime on older iPhone devices to save money.
The court filing, made Monday, means that members of the class action each will receive a whopping $3 for their troubles. However, that amount could increase if some members fail to cash their checks. The remainder of the money will cover lawyer fees and other costs.
News about this latest FaceTime lawsuit was shared by Apple Insider. Apple agreed to settle the case in February. Had it not, the suit would have gone to trial this month.
The issue in question 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, but switched to its own servers 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.
The California FaceTime lawsuit said claimants were left to choose between upgrading to Apple’s new operating system, which slowed down their devices, or losing the ability to use FaceTime.
Strangely, although Apple agreed to pay up here, a federal court threw out a nearly identical case in Florida last week. In that case, the court said the lawsuit was “untimely and must be dismissed.”
It just goes to show that, to an extent, these lawsuits basically come down to a coin toss.
