Apple is being sued for its cloud backup monopoly on iOS
Apple’s iCloud is required for cloud backups, yet the company keeps raising the price
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A class-action lawsuit filed in early March 2024 accusesAppleof restricting certain files critical tocloud backupsof its devices to its owniCloudplatform, and raising the price of the service to the point where it is ‘generating almost pure profit’.
Thefilingfor Gamboa v. Apple Inc, submitted in the US District Court of the Northern District of California, would include a nationwide class of users impacted by the monopoly, and a class of Californians who claim to have been overcharged for aniCloudplan.
We are not lawyers and make no claim to be scholars on California’s corporation laws - however, withBloombergnoting that iCloud gives Apple a 70% share of thecloud storagemarket, owing to the sheer ubiquity of their mobile devices, we think it’s fair to question the fairness of locking backups to one service and trapping users in one ever increasing pricing model.
iCloud’s competition
iCloud’s competitors includeAmazon,GoogleandMicrosoft, which all have cloud storage services available on iOS devices for the purposes of storing user data.
The prospective lawsuit alleges, however, that requiring the use of iCloud for device backups makes maintaining accounts across multiple services - which may be cheaper, and have a more generousfree cloud storageallowance than iCloud’s 5GB - inconvenient.
Apple has yet to respond to the filing, but it seems unlikely that it’ll be able to convincingly argue that backup data specific to Apple devices is sensitive enough to require locking to iCloud when, in 2022, Applesettled another class-action lawsuit, Williams v. Apple Inc, for $14.8 million, allowing it to continue to deny that it breached its own terms and conditions by storing user data on servers belonging to its competitors.
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Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.
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