A class action lawsuit filed in early March 2024 accuses Apple of restricting certain files critical to cloud backups from your devices to yours iCloud platform and raising the price of the service to the point of “generating almost pure profits.”
He presentation The case Gamboa v. Apple Inc, filed in the District Court for the Northern District of California, would include a national class of users affected by the monopoly and a class of Californians who claim they have been overcharged for an iCloud plan.
We are not attorneys and do not claim to be scholars of California corporate law; however, with Bloomberg Considering that iCloud gives Apple a 70% share of the cloud storage market, due to the sheer ubiquity of its mobile devices, we think it's fair to question the fairness of locking backups into a service and trapping to users in an ever-increasing pricing model.
iCloud competition
iCloud competitors include Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all of which have cloud storage services available on iOS devices for the purpose of storing user data.
However, the potential lawsuit alleges that requiring the use of iCloud for device backups makes it difficult to maintain accounts on multiple services, which may be cheaper and more generous in cost. Free cloud storage allocation than the 5 GB of iCloud: inconvenient.
Apple has yet to respond to the filing, but it seems unlikely that it will be able to convincingly argue that backup data specific to Apple devices is sensitive enough to require locking in iCloud when, in 2022, Apple settled another class action lawsuitWilliams against Apple Inc, for $14.8 million, allowing it to continue denying that it violated its own terms and conditions by storing user data on its competitors' servers.
