In 2017, Apple was accused of causing deliberate flaws in FaceTime, forcing users who had an iPhone 4 or 4S to migrate to iOS 7.
The lengthy lawsuit has now come to an end and the apple company has agreed to pay 18 millions of dollars in damages to resolve it.
According to the decision of the Northern California District Court, each plaintiff will receive an amount of 3 dollars for each affected iPhone.
It is recalled that, in 2017, Apple argued in court that the reason behind the blocking of the service would be related to economic issues.
The justification came from an earlier process that the technological giant had lost.
In this case, VirnetX accused Apple of infringing a patent with the technology used to connect FaceTime users during a video call.
Apple was then forced to pay $ 302.4 million in VirnetX damages and to stop using the peer-to-peer technology it had resorted to so far.
The company then started to use Akamai's servers.
The exchange ended up making the process very expensive, leading to problems with the use of FaceTime.
The only solution to the problem was to upgrade to iOS 7, since the version of the operating system integrated a new video call management technology.
In 2018, the VirnetX vs.
Apple returned to court.
The software company claimed that FaceTime, VPN on Demand and iMessage, violated distinct intellectual properties related to a secure communications system it had developed.
Apple denied all charges and the court ordered it to pay $ 502.6 million.
However, Apple did not move towards immediate compensation.
More recently, Apple agreed to pay 500 million euros in damages to settle a lawsuit in the United States related to the iPhone slowdown.
In the proposed agreement, the company would have to pay 25 dollars for each affected smartphone.
American users were not the only ones who were unhappy with the slowdown of iPhones.
Also in 2020, Apple agreed to pay a € 25 million fine in France to avoid a lawsuit.
At issue was an investigation by French anti-fraud services that concluded that there were information gaps about iOS system updates in versions 10.2.1 and 11.2.
According to the authority, Apple's performance was considered "a deceptive business practice by default".
