Apple's iPhone ringtone service has had its share of ups and downs, and the company has made many adjustments and readjustments to it in an effort to prevent workarounds that let people use anything as a ringtone. While Apple position is certainly understandable, they seem to be taking things a bit too far.

After all the updates to the ringtone service, the latest sore that users are coming across is the automatic sync function. While the feature will let you automatically sync ringtones whenever you connect your iPhone, it will only do so within certain bounds. For some unfathomable reason, the software will only sync the first 8 ringtones, ignoring everything after that. Why 8 is acceptable but 9 is too many remains unclear, but the fact of the matter is that user are having to select the remaining ringtones and set the iPhone to manually sync 'selected ringtones', which all but defies the purpose of an automatic sync.

The only slightly rational explanation is that Apple is in some way restricted by contracts, either with AT&T or the record labels, in order to prevent piracy. If so, this is a very poor approach, as those who do want to pirate ringtones will not be deterred by this, and customers who want to legitimately use the automatic sync feature can't. Although this might look like nothing more than a bug, it is not, as it is listed on Apple's support site. The company is very much aware of the limitation and suggests that users turn off automatic sync and do things manually.

These issue with the iPhone ringtone service are not the company any favors, with so many failed attempts at stopping unlicensed ringtones, and now this. Customizing your iPhone is turning out to be quite a hassle, and for all the wrong reasons.