Stefan Mileschin

One of the reasons why Apple is a closed company

Apple’s decision to allow an app to show battery life on its iPhones might stay off class suits but has revealed another reason for the company’s secret nature.

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.

http://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/4546...unpleasantness