Is Apple purposely making the lives of former iPhone users a little miserable? That is the question at the heart of a new lawsuit filed against the tech giant last week.
The lawsuit, led by plaintiff Adrienne Moore, who is seeking class-action status, claims Apple "penalizes" iPhone users who decide to switch to another type of smartphone by not sending along iMessages from remaining iPhone friends.
When an iPhone user switches to another brand of phone, any iMessages he or she receives from old texting partners theoretically should come through as text messages. But for some reason, that isn't the case: Messages sent by current iMessage users to former iMessage users have been getting lost in the cloud for some time now.
As the formal complaint (embedded in full below) puts it:
"Put simply, Apple's iMessage service and Messages application penalizes those Apple device owners who deign to switch away from Apple to other non-Apple wireless cellular devices. These former Apple device owners are penalized and injured by having Apple's iMessage service and Messages application fail to deliver text messages sent from Apple devices to the new non-Apple devices of these former Apple device users."
The problem is a longstanding one, according to CNET -- one which first surfaced when iMessage was introduced in 2011 and has affected a select group of former iPhone users ever since.
Apple has created a support page dedicated to the issue. But according to multiple accounts, the suggested solutions either don't work or don't go far enough. Apple did not immediately return a request for comment by The Huffington Post.
While the issue appears to have begun as a glitch, Apple's apparent inability to, or lack of interest in, fixing the bug has enraged those affected by it.
"[Adrienne Moore's] experience is neither isolated nor anomalous," the complaint reads. "Across the country, countless of similarly situated former Apple device owners, who have since switched away from Apple ... have experienced the same fate of undelivered text messages."