Apple sued by California couple over Wi-Fi Assist

26 Oct 2015

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Apple is being sued by a California couple for $5 million in damages related to Wi-Fi Assist.

As per the suit, after upgrading to iOS 9 on their iPhone 5s handsets, the couple saw 'overage charges' as they had unknowingly breached their data limits. Due to the number of people affected, the suit reckoned potential damages were in excess of $5 million.

According to commentators, the suit highlighted that Apple faced a real problem with Wi-Fi Assist and cell data caps.

After iOS 9 was released, a series of articles were penned pointing out that the update had caused an increase in data usage.

Even a former Apple employee who worked on OS X Wi-Fi products had in an article, agreed that it seemed to be a problem, and highlighted Apple's corporate policy as the culprit.

According to commentators, it was not exactly new for Apple to implement new features and set defaults without telling users about it first and could even be considered as Apple's usability philosophy, to try to make decisions on behalf of the users so they would not have to.

Wi-Fi Assist was added in iOS 9 to ensure that there was quality internet connection at all times and if iOS detected that Wi-Fi quality was too poor, it automatically switched to a cellular data connection.

Everything happened quietly and smoothly so that users was not even aware that there was a problem and depending on their data plan, users could incur some unwanted and unexpected charges.

The lawsuit alleged that Apple was in violation of California's Unfair Competition Law, its False Advertising Law, and also accused the company of negligent misrepresentation.

The lawsuit also stated that Apple never even mentioned such a feature and had maintained silence until news websites started talking about it.

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