A judge has ordered Apple to face a federal lawsuit for
failing to tell customers that switching from an iPhone
to some other mobile platform would prevent them
from receiving messages from other iPhone owners.
This comes just days after Apple released a new web
tool that allowed users who switched from an iPhone
to deregister their phone number from iMessage.
The problem occurs because the phone number is still
registered on Apple’s servers, so Apple tries to route
messages sent from an iPhone through iMessage
rather than sending it as an SMS through your carrier’s
network.
Reuters reports that Judge Lucy Koh has ruled that
former iPhone customer Adrianne Moore’s lawsuit will
be allowed to continue. Interestingly, Judge Koh had
presided over the Apple’s and Samsung’s landmark
patent lawsuit. Moore had filed a lawsuit earlier in the
year which alleged that she did not receive messages
after switching from an iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy
S4, which interfered with her contract with Verizon for
wireless service.
Moore, who seeks class-action status and
unspecified damages, claimed that Apple failed to
disclose how its iOS 5 software operating system
would obstruct the delivery of “countless” messages
from other Apple device users if iPhone users
switched to non-Apple devices.
In a Monday night decision, Koh said Moore
deserved a chance to show Apple disrupted her
wireless service contract and violated a California
unfair competition law, by blocking messages meant
for her.
“Plaintiff does not have to allege an absolute right to
receive every text message in order to allege that
Apple’s intentional acts have caused an actual
breach or disruption of the contractual relationship,”
Koh wrote.
The court documents reveal that Apple’s lawyers
argued that it never claimed that its iMessage service
and Messages app would recognize when iPhone
users switched to other mobile platforms, and that the
law does not cover technology that “simply does not
function as plaintiff subjectively believes it should.”
Over the weekend, Apple launched a new tool which
allows users to manually deregister their phone
number from iMessage to ensure that they can
continue to receive messages from iPhone owners after
switching to another device. However, it still doesn’t
solve the issue raised by the plaintiff of notifying
users when they switch to non-Apple devices.
Apple should probably look at implementing a system,
which delivers the text message as an SMS if it can’t
successfully deliver the message via iMessage. Apple
should seriously consider making “Send as
SMS” (found under iMessage) if the iMessage is not
delivered as default.
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