The WordPress founder says the company has been unable to update its iOS app until it gives Apple a cut of its in-app purchases.
There’s one small detail worth knowing. Sean Hollister at The Verge:
Here’s the thing: the WordPress app on iOS doesn’t sell anything. I just checked, and so did Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. The app simply lets you make a website for free. There isn’t even an option to buy a unique dot-com or even dot-blog domain name from the iPhone and iPad app — it simply assigns you a free WordPress domain name and 3GB of space.
This is either a pretty ill-timed mistake from Apple, or whatever is going on with the App Store folks over there is way more out of hand than we knew. I hope it is the former, but given the incidents of the last few weeks, I think it’s harder than ever to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here.
Update: It seems that WordPress app did run afoul of the rules. Juli Clover:
As it turns out, the WordPress app was in violation of Apple’s App Store policies because there were references to upgrading to paid plans within the app’s help system that linked to the WordPress plan option on the web, something which was not made clear when reports about the WordPress app being forced to implement in-app purchases came out.
Apple’s rules around this are still bad, but thankfully the WordPress situation wasn’t as terrible as it seemed.