Apple Sued by Disgruntled iPhone 3G User

Added by Annika L. Krugel on November 8, 2010

An unhappy iPhone 3G owner has filed a lawsuit against Apple for turning her phone into “a device with little more use than that of a paper weight”.

Biana Wofford is seeking class action status for her lawsuit which she has filed in the Superior Court of California, and which came about following Apple’s iOS4 software update to iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS.

Once installed, the update caused significant slow-down in phone performance, and it caused many apps to crash.

Wofford said in her complaint that “rather then improving anything, it has rendered the iPhone 3G devices virtually unusable, constantly slowed, crashed or frozen and less versatile than the device consumers purchased and the earlier iOS 3.x version firmware”.

The required update came about just before the iPhone 4 hit the shops and Wofford argues that Apple released the update knowing it would cause problems in the older phones’ performance so that users would rather buy a new iPhone 4.

However, Apple community website MacTalk owner Anthony Agius, said he did not think Apple had deliberately slowed down the iPhone 3G, but that they could have avoided the whole situation had they just allowed people to remove the iOS4 update.