Apple Lawsuits

Back in 2008, Jay Freeman first released Cydia as an app store designed for the iPhone, offering apps a few months before Apple had its own App Store. Since then, Cydia has served as an app repository for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, making it easy to install unauthorized software on compatible devices. Now Cydia is joining a growing cadre of developers accusing Apple of anticompetitive...

An EU consumer advocacy group has filed class-action lawsuits against Apple in both Belgium and Spain for "unfair and misleading commercial practices" related to the iPhone performance management system it introduced in iOS 10.2.1 without informing customers. Brought by Euroconsumers, which describes itself as the "world's leading consumer cluster organization," the suits allege that the...

An antitrust lawsuit leveled at Apple by Blix Inc. has been dismissed by a federal judge, in what appears to be a major setback for developers accusing Apple of malpractice with its App Store (via Bloomberg). BlueMail was removed from the Mac App Store in June 2019 after Apple found the app to be in violation of several ‌App Store‌ Review Guidelines, including "proposing to override basic...

A California federal judge on Tuesday dismissed some of Apple's counterclaims against Epic Games in its ongoing antitrust battle over Apple's App Store fees (via Bloomberg). Apple and Epic have been in a legal fight since August, when Apple removed Fortnite from the ‌App Store‌ after ‌Epic Games‌ introduced a direct payment option in the app, defying the ‌App Store‌ rules. ‌Epic Games‌...

Apple and Epic Games do not want to have a jury trial in their ongoing legal dispute over Fortnite and Apple's App Store policies, according to a filing submitted to the Northern California court handling the case today. The two companies said they have met and have agreed that both Epic's claims and Apple's counterclaims should be tried by the court with a bench trial at a date to be...

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said Apple must pay over 12,000 retail workers in California for the time spent waiting for compulsory bag searches at the end of their shifts (via Reuters). A unanimous three-judge panel reversed a judge who had tossed the case and ordered him to enter summary judgment for the plaintiffs, after the California Supreme Court in response to...

Another class-action complaint has been lodged against Apple, which claims that the company was aware of a MacBook Pro design flaw that caused some devices to have backlight display issues (via Apple Insider). The so-called "flexgate" problem was present in some ‌MacBook Pro‌ models manufactured between 2016 and 2017. The problem appears as dark patches along the bottom of the ‌MacBook Pro‌...

The United States International Trade Commission (USITC) today announced that it is launching an investigation to determine whether Apple's mobile devices and Macs violate patents owned by Japanese consumer electronics company Maxell. [PDF] Maxell filed a complaint with the USITC on July 17, alleging that Apple's mobile devices, tablets, smartwatches, and laptop computers violate patents...

Apple needs to pay PanOptis $506 million for willfully infringing on a handful of patents related to 4G LTE technology, a Texas federal jury ruled today (via Law360). The jury said that Apple did not prove that PanOptis' patent claims were invalid, resulting in the order to pay $506 million in royalties. PanOptis first levied a lawsuit against Apple in February 2019 on behalf of five of its...

U.S. federal judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers this week ruled that a class action lawsuit accusing Apple of fraudulently concealing weakening demand for iPhones between August 2017 and January 2019 can proceed in part, as reported by Reuters. In January 2019, Apple lowered its revenue guidance to $84 billion for the first quarter of its 2019 fiscal year, down from its original forecast of $89...

A proposed class action lawsuit in the U.S. has accused Google of violating federal wiretap laws by tracking the online activities of users when in Incognito mode. According to Reuters, the class action argues that by surreptitiously collecting information about what people view online and where they browse when they use Chrome's private browsing mode, Google has been intentionally deceiving...

A lawsuit that accused Apple and M. Night Shyamalan of copying 2013 film "The Truth About Emanuel" for the "Servant" Apple TV+ series has been dismissed, reports Variety. A federal judge today threw out the copyright lawsuit, which had been levied against Apple and Shyamalan by director Francesca Gregorini, who claimed that "Servant" appropriated the plot of her movie and used the same...

Apple has been involved in a long-running iPhone trademark dispute in Brazil, which was revived today by IGB Electronica, a Brazilian consumer electronics company that originally registered the "‌iPhone‌" name in 2000. IGB Electronica fought a multi-year battle with Apple in an attempt to get exclusive rights to the "‌iPhone‌" trademark, but ultimately lost, and now the case has been brought ...

A nationwide class action lawsuit filed against Apple in Northern California court this week accuses the company of knowingly concealing a defect with a display-related flex cable on recent 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models. As discovered by repair website iFixit last year, some MacBook Pro models released in 2016 and 2017 have experienced issues with uneven backlighting caused by a...

Security researchers are scared to use, buy, or even talk about iPhone emulation software Corellium after Apple levied a lawsuit against the company, reports Motherboard. Apple in August 2019 filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Corellium, a mobile device virtualization company that works with iOS. In the lawsuit, Apple claimed that Corellium had illegally replicated the operating...

Apple has agreed to pay $18 million to settle a California class-action lawsuit that accused it of intentionally breaking FaceTime in iOS 6 to force users to upgrade to iOS 7. According to the lawsuit, originally filed in 2017, Apple forced users to upgrade so it could avoid payments on a data deal with Akamai. Apple used two connection methods when it launched ‌‌FaceTime‌‌ in 2010: a...

A court in Florida has dismissed a consumer lawsuit alleging that Apple intentionally "broke" FaceTime on older iPhones as a cost-saving measure (via Bloomberg Law). In 2017, a similar class-action lawsuit was brought against Apple in California that claimed Apple broke ‌FaceTime‌ in iOS 6 to force users to upgrade to iOS 7. According to the lawsuit, Apple forced users to upgrade so it could ...

Apple in January was ordered to pay the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) $838 million for infringing on Caltech patents related to WiFi transmissions. Apple was hoping to get one of the patents in the case invalidated, but today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against Apple and declined to invalidate the patent in question, upholding a prior decision from ...

Apple has been in an ongoing legal fight with Gerard Williams III, who worked at Apple until February 2019 when he left to start up a new company called Nuvia with other Apple developers. Williams was Apple's lead chip designer, working on the A7 to A12X chips that Apple used in its mobile devices, and his new company develops processors for use in data centers. Apple first sued Williams in...

Apple broke California law when it failed to pay employees for time spent waiting for mandatory bag searches at the end of their shifts, the California Supreme Court ruled today. [PDF] The unanimous court decision, shared today by Bloomberg Law and The Los Angeles Times, dates back to a class action lawsuit filed against Apple in 2013. Employees at the time alleged that Apple subjected...