Biana Wofford is accusing Apple of using the iOS 4 upgrade to maliciously cripple the iPhone 3G , boosting sales of the iPhone 4. I don’t believe that’s true, but the lawsuit makes one excellent point: Apple should enable easy iOS downgrades.

The class-action lawsuit, filed within the Superior Court of California for San Diego, mentions here in one of its points:

Even though Apple has actual knowledge of thousands of complaints from iPhone 3G/3GS consumers, Apple would not allow for those same users/consumers of third generation devices to download and re-install earlier and optimized iOS3.x operating system without resorting to ‘hacker’ tactics in order to void Apple warranties and violate iPhone user agreements

She’s right. It really is something consumers and businesses expect. You may easily downgrade a Mac or PC computer. It’s actually a must, in case something goes wrong with the recent OS.

No technical excuses

In iOS it’s technically possible, as demonstrated by the manual technique that restores the iPhone 3G to the previous version of iOS. Even while the radio baseband software-which controls the phone’s communication with the cellular network-can’t get downgraded, there aren’t any technical problems with downgrading the iPhone’s operating system itself.

So, why doesn’t Apple allow users to easily downgrade their iOS devices? For Apple-and developers-having everyone on the most recent version of the operating system is smart. It’s one target to discover and one OS to keep up. It makes things easier for them, cheaper.

But for consumers, that’s not the case. If a shopper feels that a new edition of the operating system doesn’t deliver the performance and lines that they were experiencing before the upgrade, they must be ready to come again to the previous version. Not with workarounds and technical voodoo, but with the touch of a button. The same as they made the upgrade.

Apple isn’t that evil

The main point of the lawsuit, which claims that Apple maliciously released an iOS 4 version to cripple the performance of iPhone 3G devices as a way to boost sales of the iPhone 4, is mindless. I doubt anyone at Apple or any other company would even consider doing this kind of thing. Especially Apple, who can’t barely cope up with the demand for their newly released cellphones.

In any case, the iPhone 3G’s iOS 4 performance problems-which I experienced myself-can be a made from incompetency. Or lack of testing. Or even lack of respect for users of older products. But no, not malice or conspiracy theories to sell more handsets. [ Free Republic via Ars Technica ]

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This post is tagged: class action lawsuit, generation devices, Operating System, previous version, superior court of california