In a drastic legal step that will have set alarm bells ringing throughout the tech rumorsphere, Apple has sued the YouTuber Jon Prosser for leaking information about iOS 26 ahead of its launch. Or, more specifically, for the methods he allegedly used to obtain that information.
As reported by MacRumors, the company on Thursday filed a lawsuit (Scribd link) against Prosser and his associate Michael Ramacciotti, alleging misappropriation of trade secrets. The suit accuses the two of a “coordinated scheme” to break into a “development” iPhone, steal Apple secrets from it, and profit from them, thereby harming the company and its employees.
“Defendants’ misconduct was brazen and egregious,” the suit asserts. “After Mr Prosser learned that Mr Ramacciotti needed money, and that his friend Ethan Lipnik worked at Apple on unreleased software designs, Defendants jointly planned to access Apple’s confidential and trade secret information through Mr Lipnik’s Apple-owned development iPhone.
“While staying at Mr Lipnik’s home, Mr Ramacciotti used location tracking to determine when Mr Lipnik would be gone for an extended period, acquired his passcode, and broke into his Development iPhone, which Mr Lipnik had failed to properly secure according to Apple’s policies. As he detailed in the audio message, Mr Ramacciotti made a video call to Mr Prosser and ‘showed iOS’ on the Development iPhone. He demonstrated several features and applications, disclosing details of the unreleased iOS 19 [later announced as iOS 26] operating system.”
Apple is famous for the zealousness with which the company guards its secrets, but this may be the most aggressive step it has taken against a leaker since Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home was raided in 2010.
iOS 26, Apple’s newest iPhone software update, was unveiled at WWDC in June, but as is often the case with unreleased Apple products it had been the subject of intense and argumentative speculation long before then. In March, Prosser posted a video claiming to offer “your very first look at iOS 19,” and later showed a screenshot of the new Messages app in a podcast. (It’s possible these videos will be taken down as the lawsuit progresses, so if you’re reading this in the future, you may have to take our word for it.) Fellow leaker Mark Gurman then claimed that iOS 19 screenshots doing the rounds–probably including Prosser’s screenshot, but not naming him–were “unrepresentative,” before Prosser finally hit back with the “biggest iOS leak ever.”
It now appears, if we are to believe Apple’s version of events, that Prosser was so bullish about his information because it had been acquired from one of Apple’s own devices running a pre-release build of the software.
But Prosser claims otherwise. In a pair of replies to MacRumors’ tweet about this story, the YouTuber says “This is not how things went down on my end” and “I certainly did not ‘plot’ to access anyone’s phone and was unaware of the situation playing out.” That would appear to imply that, while Ramacciotti may indeed have lifted the information from Lipnik’s iPhone, Prosser didn’t ask for this to happen nor know when it did.
(It’s also striking that the first word of his reply is simply “Interesting.” That’s an astonishingly calm response to being sued by one of the biggest and most litigious companies in the world. He’s an unusual character, as we found when we interviewed him back in 2020.)
It will be interesting to see how this move affects the flow of information through the tech rumorsphere: whether leakers will be cowed into silence, even if only temporarily, and whether their sources dry up. It does raise the question, of course, of how leakers acquire their information about unreleased iOS builds if not through methods similar to the one described in this lawsuit. How did Gurman know about iOS 19/26? Will he be sued? Is there a legitimate way to leak?
All these questions and more will be answered in the coming months. We will follow the case as it progresses and report the big developments here on Macworld.