Apple acknowledged in December that its software sometimes deliberately slows phones with weak batteries. Apple apologised and lowered the price of battery replacements in its stores from $79 to $29 for affected phones.
According to Reuters, critics say Apple has obfuscated the fact that a worn-out battery not only fails to hold a charge, it also degrades the phone’s performance. The company’s lack of transparency on the issue has pushed people to buy a new phone rather than a new battery.
iFixit chief executive Kyle Wiens said that Apple has been pretending the battery doesn’t wear out. “They’ve made billions of dollars on that pretence.”
Apple has managed to pull this stunt off because it banned battery-health apps from the App Store for security reasons. While a few developers had found ways around the restrictions, Apple insisted that a key piece of information - the “charge cycle count,” or how many times the battery has been drained and recharged - after a 2016 software update.
Rogerio Hirooka of Lirum Labs said his company’s app lost charge cycle counts in 2016 but can still provide information on charge capacity, which can be used to determine whether the battery is at the end of its life. He said a routine bug-fix for the app was rejected by Apple in December, just before Apple acknowledged the battery-slowing issue.
Apple told him that his app had been rejected because it had a potentially inaccurate diagnostic functionality that could mislead or confuse users. Apple explains that “there is no publicly available infrastructure to support iOS diagnostic analysis". Apple also allowed battery diagnosis to be available on the Mac but not on the iPhone.
It would appear that under this cunning plan the only way to check an iPhone battery is to take the device to an Apple Store or hook the phone up to a Mac computer running special third-party software. This was unlikely given the fact that Apple fanboys have the technical expertise of a halibut.
Meanwhile, Apple has been lobbying against “right to repair” laws in several US states that would require it to sell parts to independent repair shops.
All this seems to suggest that Jobs’ Mob was actively trying to stop users discovering the truth about their battery life so that they would upgrade their phones rather than the cheaper option of buying a new battery. Of course, that must be completely wrong. After all, Apple is a super-cool, innovative company which loves its users.
