Last week was pretty hectic for the Cupertino company. A real war has started between Epic Games and Apple. The publisher of the popular game Fortnite has decided to take Apple to court after the Apple-based company decided to ban Fortnite from the App Store and remove the developer account from Epic Games. Fortnite’s parent company has many allies in this battle, such as Spotify. However, Epic Games will not be able to count on the support of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.
On August 21, 2020, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress tweeted accusing Apple of blocking updates to the CMS application. In one of his tweets, Matt Mullenweg explains, “In order to be able to fix bugs and be able to implement new updates, we must commit to making the app compatible with in-app purchases.” This means that the Cupertino company would have explicitly asked a free app to add a payment system in order to take its 30% commission on purchases.
Apple wanted to tax a free app?
It is precisely this commission that angered companies like Epic Games, Spotify, Tinder and more recently Microsoft. However, in the case of the WordPress application, the justification of this commission is more difficult knowing that this application does not sell anything to its users. Two days after Matt Mullenweg’s statements, the company led by Tim Cook issued a statement apologizing for the confusion.
“We believe the issue with the WordPress app has been resolved. The app developer has withdrawn the payment options that existed in the app, which is now completely free and does not allow purchases, ”writes Apple. By wanting to assuage its authority at all costs, Apple ends up getting lost and making mistakes like this, which could discredit its own arguments during the lawsuit against Epic Games.
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