The Apple iPhone maker has been slapped with a lawsuit that accuses the company of advertising the storage capacity that’s available in its devices falsely, including the iPhones, the iPods and the iPads too. Filed in the Northern district of California, the lawsuit states that the storage capacity that’s advertised for the company’s mobile devices is eaten up by the massive data footprint, which belongs to the software installed of the iOS 8 operating system. Jonas Mann, the attorney of the plaintiffs mentioned in a court filing that in reality, the end users were given storage capacity that wasn’t even remotely close to what is advertised.

There is a substantial difference between the advertised and available capacity, which isn’t reasonable at all, he continued. It is considered a common practice amongst most consumer electronics manufacturers to mention the storage capacity and memory of their devices before adding the pre-loaded applications and operating software. According to the complaints of the plaintiffs, the Cupertino, California based company does not offer its customers the option of inserting memory cards into its devices for increasing their storage capacity, even though this feature is a common occurrence in nearly all smartphones sold by rival manufacturers. No comment was made by an Apple spokeswoman when asked about the lawsuit.

The attorney of the plaintiffs said that the storage capacity of the iPhone 6 Plus has been advertised as 16 gigabytes. In reality, the device is only able to hold about 12.7 gigabytes of songs, photos, applications and other data. As compared to the advertised storage, this is nearly a ¼ or 21% reduction, which cannot be deemed acceptable by the end users. As per the filing, for the iPhone 6, 13 gigabytes is available for storage as opposed to the 16 GB storage advertised. It is further alleged in the lawsuit that advertisements are delivered by Apple for its paid iCloud online storage option when the storage capacity of the device is nearly full.

The case has been filed by two customers of Apple Inc. based in Miami, Florida, namely Christopher Endara and Paul Orshan. It is seeking the status of a class action lawsuit and the plaintiffs are looking for about $5 million in damages from the American smartphone giant. The company is being sued by the customers under the false advertising and unfair competition laws of California. Back in 2012 as well, the firm had to fend off a lawsuit in Canada over misleading customers about the storage capacity of its iPods.

The company managed to sell about 10 million iPhones in the opening weekend release of the two latest models of its iPhone in September. However, the celebration had to be cut short because an update to the iOS 9 disabled the cellular service of customers. There were also complaints about the update causing several applications to crash and affecting the performance of the finger-print reading feature due to which Apple pulled the update to fix it. On September 25th, a fixed version of the update was released.

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