A class action style lawsuit is being launched against Apple in the UK, and it's worth $935 million.
The suit accuses the mobile maker of abusing its market dominance to engage in exploitative and unfair commercial practices when it misled iPhone users by applying a power management software update.
The suit is being filed in the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London on behalf of up to 25 million UK iPhone users who used any of the 10 different models of the device.
The litigation, which is being bankrolled by a litigation funder called Balance Legal Capital, is opt out, not opt in, meaning affected UK consumers don't need to actively sign up to be part of the representative suit.
There is a new website with information about the suit.
There are a number of lawsuits against Apple over the performance of the iPhone.
It paid up to $500 million to settle a class action suit on home turf that accused it of slowing down the performance of older iPhones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries.
Apple was fined $27 million by France's competition watchdog for not telling users about device settings. Apple agreed to put a statement on its website about the sanction for a month after paying the fine.
Italy's consumer watchdog hit Apple with smaller financial penalties for forcing updates that could slow or break devices.
Users were not made aware of the detrimental effect the tool would have on their device before it was downloaded, according to the complaint.
Users who didn't update to the latest version of the software risked being exposed to bugs and security flaws. Some users were forced to install the update up to 70 times, while others were unable to uninstall it, meaning they were stuck with any negative impact on their device performance.
The complaint will argue that Apple misled customers by failing to make it clear that the tool would slow device performance, only stating that the update improves power management during peak workload to avoid unexpected shutdowns.
The company apologized for its handling of the episode and ran a battery replacement program for all affected models through the end of the year.
He said that Apple misled people by concealing a tool in software updates that slowed their devices by up to 58 percent.
Millions of iPhone users in the UK will be compensated for the harm caused by Apple. If this case is successful, I hope dominant companies don't do this kind of conduct anymore.
When asked why the suit is being filed now, a spokesman for the man said that he has been working on the claim for a long time. They said that it takes time to build a claim like this, including investigating the technical aspects of it.
A number of class actions have been filed. Apple has been fined by the French and Italian regulators in relation to this conduct and has settled several class actions in the US. Mr Gutmann understands that consumer law class actions have been certified in Canada and Spain, but not in other European countries.
In the UK, a class action style litigation was launched against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, in order to recover damages from a tech giant.
Privacy law-focused representative actions suffered a set back in the UK last year when the Supreme Court sided withGoogle, ending a long running litigation over a workaround it had applied to Apple'sSafari between 2011 and 2012 which overrode iPhone users' privacy settings.
It will be interesting to see if litigation lawyers have more success using competition claims to extract representative damages over harmful Big, as the class action style litigation failed as the court deemed it necessary to demonstrate damage/loss on an individual basis.
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