Qualcomm filed another a lawsuit against Apple with a San Diego, California-based court on Wednesday, alleging that the iPhone maker failed to protect the chipmaker’s proprietary mobile chip software like it was contractually obliged to do so, having supposedly allowed some of Qualcomm’s solutions to be leaked to its major competitor Intel. The litigation hinges on the accusation that Apple’s team working with Qualcomm who enjoyed access to some of the tech giant’s technologies wasn’t efficiently segregated from the Cupertino-based company’s division collaborating with Intel.
The firm’s main evidence supporting the allegation is said to be an email from one of Apple’s engineers to their colleague at Qualcomm, wherein the former requested access to some information about an unspecified proprietary software related to phone chips via email and carbon-copied an Intel engineer to the said correspondence. Qualcomm claims that incident proves Apple’s contract-breaching omission, adding that the smartphone manufacturer isn’t allowing the company to audit its internal practices related to protecting Qualcomm’s protected technologies utilized in iPhones which is also supposedly mandated by a contract between the two, Bloomberg reports.
The two tech giants are still waging a number of other legal battles which started when Apple sued Qualcomm in early 2017, accusing the chipmaker of charging excessive royalties on standard-essential patents. Intel previously sided with Apple in the dispute, though it isn’t officially involved in the matter, and neither is the Santa Clara-based company named as a defendant in Qualcomm’s newly initiated litigation. Apple is presently in the process of transitioning the iPhone lineup away from Qualcomm’s technologies, having started its collaboration with Intel with the 2016 iPhone 7 series. Some industry sources previously claimed that the iPhone maker will completely drop Qualcomm’s technologies next year with the iPhone 9 family, though no official confirmation of these reports has yet been provided by Apple. If the original equipment manufacturer is successful in circumventing Qualcomm’s chips and related solutions with its future mobile offerings, it would likely deliver a heavy hit to the chipmaker’s bottom line. The San Diego-based semiconductor company previously said it expects its relations with Apple to improve in some unspecified future, with its CEO Steven Mollenkopf describing their recent clashes as being strictly business.