A lawsuit filed last May against Apple regarding lost text messages will be allowed to proceed, Reuters reports. U.S.
District Judge Lucy Koh stated that Apple will be required to face Adrienne Moore’s complaint that iMessage interfered with her contract with Verizon Wireless, which serviced her Samsung Galaxy S5 after switching from an iPhone 4. Although Apple acknowledged the issue in May, it did not come up with a viable solution until this week, releasing an iMessage deregistration tool for former iPhone users to deregister their cellular numbers from Apple’s iMessage network, thereby allowing messages sent from iPhone users to revert back to using the standard carrier SMS network, rather than being directed to the user’s former iPhone via Apple’s iMessage network.
It’s noteworthy that Apple’s alternative solution—manually turning iMessages off on your old device after inserting a SIM card—would not have worked for the iPhone 4 or 4S, the Verizon versions of which did not use SIM cards.
In its own court filing, Apple noted that it has never made any claims that its iMessage service and Messages application would recognize when iPhone users switched to competing devices, stating that “the law does not provide a remedy when, as here, technology simply does not function as plaintiff subjectively believes it should.” In her decision, Judge Koh said that Moore deserved a chance to show that Apple disrupted her wireless service contract and in doing so violated a California unfair competition law by blocking messages sent to her after she switching to a rival device.
