A federal judge has ruled that Apple will have to face a lawsuit over the iMessage issue where users who left their iPhone in favor of an Android or other device found they could no longer receive messages from their iPhone-using contacts.
According to Reuters, Judge Lucy Koh has ruled that former iPhone customer Adrianne Moore’s lawsuit, filed earlier this year, will be allowed to continue. Moore’s lawsuit alleges that she ceased receiving messages after she switched to the Samsung Galaxy S5 from an iPhone 4, which interfered with her contract with Verizon Wireless. Moore is seeking both class-action status and unspecified damages from Apple.
Apple had argued that there is no law that covers technology that “simply does not function as plaintiff subjectively believes it should,” and also noted that the company had never claimed that iMessage would be able to recognize when an iPhone user switched to another device platform.
On Monday, Judge Koh said Moore deserved the chance to show that Apple had disrupted her wireless service contract, and had violated a California unfair competition law, by not delivering messages meant for her.
The issue surrounding the inability to receive text messages from iPhone using contacts after switching to another mobile device platform is one that has long affected former iPhone users. The iMessages sent from iPhone owners continued to be routed to the deactivated iPhone, instead of being forwarded as a text message to the new device.
Apple recently debuted a new online tool that allows users to deregister their old iPhone’s phone number from iMessage to prevent this from occuring.
