BitShare

This was not a good week for Apple

It takes a lot to knock Apple off kilter, who is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. If any time were a bad time for Apple, this week may have been it. Let’s take a look back and see just how bad it was for multi-billion dollar company.

Well for starters, Apple began the week fresh off of the Google I/O conference, which debuted two new products that will effect Apple’s long-term sales: Nexus 7 tablet (iPad competitor) and Google Now (aka the Siri killer). These should have been signs that good things were not going to go well for Apple this week.

On Monday it was announced that Apple had to pay $60 million to Proview technology company for a legal settlement over the iPad trademark in China. For months, Apple has not been able to proceed with iPad sales in China because Proview owned the iPad trademark, losing millions of dollars in that region. Finally through the settlement, Apple is now able to begin sales of the iPad in China without being caught up in lawsuits of the iPad brand. Although it’s a fresh start for Apple in China, who will now be able to bolster their revenue in Q3, they had to shell out quite a bit of money to get there this week.

Monday wasn’t a good day for Apple. In addition to the settlement payout, a new movement started which gained a lot of traction called #BoycottApple. The call to action by many Samsung and Android users came about due to a court injunction granted to Apple which will ban the sales of the Samsung Galaxy over a patent dispute. Although it was a move that Apple wanted, the negative results in the media have not been good this week and may have more long-term effects.

On Independence day, more drama came Apple’s way. An Apple server bug corrupted App Store downloads for hundreds of apps, with big app names such as Instapaper, Angry Birds, Huffington, LA Times, Good Reader and more. Due to the bug, hundreds of apps would crash upon launch. This caused for a horrible UX, which in turn caused bad reviews for the affected apps, and a bunch of upset customers. Two days later on July 6 Apple was able to completely fix the issue, but not without causing a lot of headaches including one for themselves this week.

To add insult to injury and complete a disastrous week for Apple, for the first time in Apple’s history, researchers said they found an iPhone app that contains malware. This may sound trivial, but it’s a big deal for Apple who prides it’s app ecosystem on security and quality. The iPhone app “Find and Call” would take all the app users contacts and secretly upload them, then send them spam text messages and emails on the entire contact list. Once Apple was made aware of the spammy malware app, it was removed, but the damage was done for this week.