On Friday, the world-wide-web erupted in a small way to study that Apple experienced properly forced WordPress to monetize its absolutely free application — forcing it to provide quality strategies and personalized area names seemingly just so that Apple could get its traditional 30 percent minimize.

But a person afternoon and evening of surprise and outrage later, Apple is backing off. The enterprise is issuing a scarce on-the-record apology, and it suggests that WordPress will no for a longer time have to increase in-app buys now that all is mentioned and finished.

Here’s Apple’s whole assertion:

We feel the concern with the WordPress application has been solved. Because the developer removed the exhibit of their provider payment solutions from the app, it is now a free of charge stand-by yourself app and does not have to offer you in-app buys. We have knowledgeable the developer and apologize for any confusion that we have caused.

You are going to observe that Apple is positioning this as the developer — WordPress — having completed the proper detail and taken out the “display of their provider payment options from the application,” and to my awareness that is technically true. But as far as I’m aware, that didn’t come about currently: it occurred months or months ago.

While as of yesterday, the WordPress app did not market a solitary point and didn’t so substantially as point out a compensated “Wordpress.com” prepare unless of course you adopted an not likely workaround, I was equipped to track down a fellow journalist this weekend who had a significantly older version of the application, 1 with a focused “Plans” tab that listed some of the unique strategies out there to quality consumers:

That said, my resource informed me there was no capacity to purchase any of these options — and I can ensure the entire “Plans” part had by now been removed by the time WordPress developer Matt Mullenwag explained to us Apple had productively forced him to include Apple’s in-app purchases (IAP). (At first, he’d said Apple locked him out of updating the application except he added Apple IAP inside 30 days.)

What’s extra, Mullenwag informed us that he experienced previously offered to strip other mentions of the paid out plans out of the application (even workarounds like when a consumer sights a preview of their individual WordPress webpage and then navigates to WordPress.com), only to have those tips turned down by Apple.

So, to the greatest of my understanding, this is not WordPress caving however all over again. Apple merely appears to be to have made a decision that striving to extract its minimize from a totally free application — by forcing in-application purchases — isn’t a hill worth dying on currently.