Apple has announced that it will extend all MobileMe customer subscriptions by 60 days as a thank you for putting up with the countless problems the service has encountered during the transition from .Mac bringing the total free trial period up to nearly six months.

Users hit snags from the beginning with the new Apple service. Many customers complained that they had been charged for what was advertised as a free trial of the service. Moreover, the last month or so has seen bugs galore and service outages to boot, the most notable break in service lasting a full 11 days before customers heard word of any kind of restoration process. When service was restored, customers were told that, while every effort was being made to ensure data lost during the whole debacle was recovered, some of it was gone forever.

When MobileMe was first rolled out, customers were offered a 60-day free trial of the service. Those who were accidentally charged for the service were offered another month free, on top of the initial two months they were already getting. Following the subscription fiasco, Apple offered customers a further 30 days free after it admitted the use of the term “push” to describe everything under the MobileMe umbrella had been erroneous.

Adding on today’s offer of another 60 days will mean customers that have been with the service from day one now have 180 days of MobileMe free of charge. While we think it’s great that Apple is apologizing and accepting that the launch left a lot to be desired and the service isn’t quite up to scratch, all these free trials make it look like the MobileMe team is just desperate to keep people around so they don’t make good on their complaints to switch to another service.

On the plus side, many people have been complaining that they shouldn’t be experiencing these problems with a service they’re paying for and it’s starting to look like Apple won’t be charging them until things start running more smoothly. Apple has just bought the MobileMe team two extra months of time to work out the kinks.