Have you ever wondered why your friends with iPhones never seem to text back or take their sweet time answering? They aren’t ignoring you. Well, not all of the time, anyways. A new lawsuit alleges that iPhones don’t deliver text messages to users on Android and other mobile phones with the problems worst for users who switched from iPhones to other devices.

A woman in California filed the lawsuit and is seeking class-action status for it. To do so, more complainants would have to come forward to join this lawsuit. One report indicates that there are no shortage of people who have had issues with their switch from iPhones. Whether any will join the suit is a different matter.

The suit alleges that Apple has violated fair competition laws and interferes with contractual fulfillment by mobile phone providers. The claim is that Apple does not deliver (or at least not in a timely fashion) text messages from iPhone to Android phones, especially for users who have switched from iOS devices. Therefore, the suit says, users are “penalized and unable to obtain the full benefits of their wireless-service contracts.”

The crux of the issue seems to lie with Apple’s iMessage system. The system handles all text messaging for iOS devices. Your phone and its number are tagged with an iMessage ID. When iOS messages are sent, they go through the iMessage system and they go to you using your iMessage ID. If you don’t have iMessage, the message may not get delivered because iMessage is trying to send it to your old ID because that’s where it thinks your phone number is rather than trying to deliver through SMS or MMS.

According to Apple customer support, if you intend to switch from an iOS to other device, you have to deactivate  iMessage prior to making that switch. Failure to do so could result in your messages getting delayed or never getting delivered for the up to 45 days it will take for iMessage to figure out that you’re not there anymore.

What this lawsuit may come down to is whether Apple is trying to deliberately punish people who switch and if Apple hasn’t sufficiently informed customers that switching may cause their messages to become undeliverable. At the very least, this lawsuit will bring this issue to people’s attention. Not that it should have existed in the first place.

Sources: Bloomberg, Business Insider