Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012
From: Nathan Anderson
To: Tim Cook
Cc: Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall
Subject: Frustrated unlocked iPhone user

Gentlemen,

Great show yesterday.  It looks like you have a very strong holiday
line-up and should be able to attract many new customers with it.

In the meantime, over here, there are some frustrated existing
customers who feel like they are not being heard.  Customers such as
myself.

I have an open case with AppleCare support on my particular issue
(#3622xxxxx).  A week has passed, and although everyone I have talked
to has been kind, polite, and patient with me, I am being told that at
this point, there is really nothing more they can do, so I am coming
to you guys.  At the recommendation of my case handler, I also
composed and sent in a quite lengthy note via the iPhone product
feedback page (at http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html).  I want
to take as little of your time as possible, so rather than reproduce
the entire thing here, I'm going to give you the "Cliff's Notes"
version.  If after reading this you want more detail and wish to read
my original submission to the feedback page, I would be more than
happy to send a copy your way.

In short, I have an iPhone.  An officially unlocked iPhone.  And I
want to use it with the carrier of my choice: Straight Talk.  Given
that it is an unlocked phone, this does not seem like an unreasonable
request.  Unfortunately, the team that worked on carrier activation in
iOS was shortsighted and cobbled together a system that, literally
unlike any other unlocked GSM phone on the planet, actually prevents
me from properly configuring my iPhone to work with my service
provider.

Clever and enterprising people found a way to get the iPhone to work
100% with Straight Talk in iOS 5, and to do so without resorting to
"jailbreaking."  So back before iOS 6, even though the phone fought me
at every step of the way, I managed to get my unlocked phone to work
perfectly with Straight Talk.

But then I made the mistake of upgrading to iOS 6, which prevents the
previous workaround from being implemented on the phone any longer.
The long and the short of it is that the "upgrade" broke my ability to
send or receive MMS messages with my phone, and there is no way around
this problem on iOS 6.  (My case handler at AppleCare has supposedly
confirmed this with the "engineering group.")  I am also far from the
only one impacted by this iOS 6 engineering oversight: if you search
around for "Straight Talk MMS iOS 6" -- even on Apple's own discussion
forums! -- you will find plenty of corroborating evidence.

So, naturally, until Apple's software guys can figure out how to deal
with this problem in a future update (iOS 6.1?), I choose to roll back
to iOS 5, which can actually be made to work with Straight Talk.  But
I am being told that I'm not allowed to do so!

Actually, what I was told -- twice -- was that downgrading iOS is
simply "not supported."  But my research has informed me that it's not
just a simple matter of being "not supported": in fact, Apple has
specifically engineered every phone starting from the iPhone 3GS up to
the present iPhone 5 to artificially prevent (using technical
barricades) their customers from downgrading the software on their own
phones!  And nobody at AppleCare seems to have the authority to
override the downgrade lockout on my phone so that I can go back to
the way things were before iOS 6, back to when my phone actually
worked.

This, quite frankly, is a terrible policy.  Maybe this comes as news
to you, but...it's my phone, not yours!  A device valued at $549 that
I bought and paid for with my hard-earned dollars!  Why are you
telling me what I am or am not allowed to do with my unlocked phone?
You guys broke a key function of my phone with your software
"upgrade," don't have a fix available for it yet, but deny me the one
thing -- downgrading back to iOS 5 -- that we both know will fix it in
the meantime?  Really?

If Apple overlooks something in a software release, or has a
showstopper bug that impacts customers, it is entirely unreasonable
for Apple to expect their customers to keep using the problematic
version of the software until it is fixed.  If an older version was
working fine before the new release came out, then why not let your
customers go back to it while you take the time to work on fixing the
new one?

I thought Apple was a customer-focused company.  I thought things were
supposed to "just work."  Instead, I've learned that Apple is more
interested in forcing software updates on customers than they are in
making sure that their customers' needs are being taken care of.  This
"no downgrades, ever, under any circumstances" policy only penalizes
and punishes customers.  You should allow your customers to downgrade
their devices to older software if they need to, and this is
especially true if, on account of your error, your new software is
directly responsible for breaking a feature that previously worked.

I don't need MMS messaging on my unlocked iPhone to be fixed 2-3
months from now, or whenever iOS 6.1 is scheduled to release.  I need
it fixed now.  You guys obviously don't have a fix to give me at this
point in time, and I agree that it's absolutely reasonable to give
your developers however much time they need to come up with an
appropriate fix.  But in the meantime, you should allow me to
downgrade my phone's software to a version that I already know works
while your developers are busy working on that fix for the new
software.

Please authorize an iOS downgrade for my device, and please equip your
support personnel with the tools they need to do their job: helping
your customers.  Thank you.

Regards,

-- Nathan Anderson