A class action style lawsuit is being launched against Apple in the UK seeking damages worth a total of £768 million (circa $935M).

The representative action is being filed by consumer rights campaigner, Justin Gutmann, citing competition law -- with the suit accusing the mobile maker of abusing its market dominance to engage in exploitative and unfair commercial practices when, per the claim, it misled iPhone users by applying a power management software update, first released in January 2017 in iOS 10.2.1, that throttled the performance of affected devices.

The suit is being filed in the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London on behalf of up to 25 million UK iPhone users who used any of 10 different models of iPhone, from the iPhone 6 through to the iPhone X (and including the iPhone SE).

The litigation, which is being bankrolled by a litigation funder called Balance Legal Capital , is opt out, not opt in -- meaning affected UK consumers do not need to actively sign up to be part of the representative suit (although they would need to provide their details at a later date if the suit prevails and wish to receive their portion of any damages -- albeit, damages could be as low as ~£30 per affected device).

A website has been launched with details about the suit at https://theiphoneclaim.com/.

Apple has already faced litigation over iPhone performance 'throttling' claims in a number of other European markets.

Back in 2020, it also settled a class action suit on home turf which had similarly accused it of intentionally slowing down the performance of older iPhones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries -- shelling out up to $500M to make the litigation go away, albeit doing so without accepting wrongdoing.

In the same year, France's competition watchdog fined Apple around $27 million for throttling older devices without informing users. In that instance Apple paid the fine and agreed to display a statement on its website about the sanction for a month.