A long standing law suit against Apple and AT&T has been granted Class Action status. This gives greater impact to the suit (or tort) and allows for a greater chance of success. The suit alleges that Apple is hurting competition and the consumer by their refusal to allow non-Apple Approved applications and software on their devices. They also claim that by signing a five year exclusivity deal with AT&T for the iPhone and locking those phones to that carrier (in the US) they are actually forcing consumers to stay with AT&T to continue using their phones.  Normally to start service you only need to sign a 2 year commitment, but by locking the iPhone to AT&T a consumer will generally have to stay with them for around 4-6 years.



This suit represents something of a first as Apple has managed to skate by legal action for many items. Including exploding batteries in their products! Our hope is that this suit will also torpedo Apple’s attempts to make jailbreaking illegal as a win here for consumers would prevent Apple from locking down the OS in the first place.

This has been a long time coming and follows on the heels of Consumer Reports saying they cannot recommend the iPhone 4 in its current state.  It was not that long ago that Steve Jobs made the grievous error of banning Flash on the iOS. This restricted developers by preventing them from even using Flash as a development tool and then converting it to an iPhone compatible format.  I have a feeling it was this move, combined with the recent ridiculous statements from Apple about the reasons for the signal loss on the iPhone 4 that motivated the judge in this case.

We will be waiting on the outcome eagerly.

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