A class-action lawsuit has been filed in California that claims Apple borked FaceTime in iOS 6 to force users to upgrade to iOS 7. Apple wanted users to upgrade so it could avoid payments on a data deal with Akamai.

According to court papers, when FaceTime launched in 2010, Apple had two ways of connecting one iPhone to another  - other than the traditional two bits of iString.

The first was a peer-to-peer technology, transferred audio and video data over a direct connection, while a second "relay method" which used third-party servers run by Akamai.

Calls routed through Akamai's relay servers accounted for only five to 10 percent of FaceTime traffic, but usage quickly spiked. However, in November 2012 a jury found that Apple had stolen its FaceTime call technology from an outfit called VirnetX.

Not only did Jobs mob get a $368 million fine, the ruling meant Apple would have to shift away from peer-to-peer to avoid further infringement. Suddenly Apple began to incur multi-million dollar monthly charges from Akamai.

Testimony from the 2016 VirnetX retrial pegged relay fees at about $50 million between April 2013 and September 2013 and this somewhat bothered Apple executives.

For a year, they lived with the charges but when iOS7 Apple decided to slow down or completely negate the fees in iOS 7. It issued a “system improvement” which involved creating peer-to-peer FaceTime connections without infringing on VirnetX patents.

The only problem was that pesky users continued to operate devices running iOS 6 which meant that Apple was still having to pay out.

Citing internal emails and sworn testimony from the VirnetX trial, the lawsuit alleges Apple devised a plan to "break" FaceTime on iOS 6 or earlier by causing a vital digital certificate to prematurely expire.

Apple supposedly implemented the "FaceTime Break" on April 16, 2014, then blamed the sudden incompatibility on a bug, the lawsuit claims.

The class-action suit seeks to find Apple violated California's unfair competition law and is liable for trespass to chattels, a tort in which one party intentionally interferes with another person's possessions. Undisclosed damages are also being sought.