Apple Accused Of Facetime Fixing, Chat App Disabled To Save Money

The maker of the iPhone is currently facing a lawsuit for reportedly breaking its chat app Facetime on purpose back in 2014. The lawsuit alleges that this was intended to force users who, at the time, had iOS 6 to upgrade to a new version. Apple supposedly did this in order to stop iPhone owners from taking advantage of the call feature that was costing the company money.

For a little background information on the situation, the whole debacle started back in 2012. At the time, Apple was infringing on a service by Akamai for its peer-to-peer calls. As a result, the iPhone maker owed the service millions of dollars for past use and was continually getting charged for future uses, Fortune reports. Since Apple wanted to avoid paying the fees, it decided to make some changes with an OS update.

This is where the problem started. According to the lawsuit, some 95 percent of the Facetime users during that period relied on the service. Many of them were still using iOS 6 even after the upgraded version came out and Apple wanted them to change up as soon as possible. The lawsuit indicates that this is the reason Apple rigged Facetime in order to force users to upgrade.

The lawsuit cited internal emails that occurred during a trial to determine whether or not Apple owed Akamai money, which included certain conversations about a plan to break Facetime, AppleInsider reports. It also indicates that the initiative was launched back on April 16, 2014. At the time, whenever iOS 6 users tried to open the chat app, they would get a message prompting them to upgrade their OS.

“If you started to have issues making or receiving FaceTime calls after April 16, 2014, your device or your friend's device may have encountered a bug resulting from a device certificate that expired on that date. Updating both devices to the latest software will resolve this issue,” the message read.