Apple has backed down in its latest developer fight, apologizing to WordPress after it tried to force the website-builder to add in-app payments

• Apple has apologized after it tried to force WordPress to add in-app payment options to a free app.
• WordPress' founder said on Friday that Apple was refusing to allow any updates to the WordPress iOS app until the website builder added in-app purchases, from which Apple takes a 15-30% commission.
• Apple is in a fierce fight with developers including Fortnite maker Epic Games and Spotify over its rules on in-app purchases.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple has backed down in its latest skirmish with a developer over its App Store rules.

The tech giant on Sunday issued a rare apology to WordPress after it pressured the website builder to add payment options to its free iOS app, or else be blocked from updating.

"We believe the issue with the WordPress app has been resolved," an Apple spokesman told The Verge. "Since the developer removed the display of their service payment options from the app, it is now a free stand-alone app and does not have to offer in-app purchases. We have informed the developer and apologize for any confusion that we have caused."

WordPress' founding developer Matt Mullenweg tweeted on Friday that Apple had locked the app out from making any updates until the website-builder added in-app purchases. Mullenweg later told the Verge he had been forced to add in-app purchases as an option, meaning Apple would get a 30% cut of any payments made.

Mullenweg tweeted about Apple's U-turn on Sunday, saying WordPress is no longer being forced to include in-app purchases.

I am very grateful that folks at Apple re-reviewed @WordPressiOS and have let us know we do not need to implement in-app purchases to be able to continue to update the app. Bad news travels faster than good, usually, so please consider sharing that they reversed course.

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) August 23, 2020

Mullenweg did not address whether WordPress had removed any display of premium payment options, as suggested in Apple's statement. The Verge's Sean Hollister writes that while the app shows no payment options, it's possible WordPress removed references to its premium services weeks ago.

Apple's rules on in-app payments are at the center of an ongoing fight with developers. Developers are obliged to use Apple's payment system, which automatically takes a 15-30% cut.

Apple is currently engaged in a fight with Fortnite maker Epic Games, after Epic introduced its own payment system into the mobile versions of Fortnite, circumventing Apple's commission. In response, both Apple and Google pulled the game from their app stores. Epic then filed for a temporary restraining order against Apple to try to block it from removing the app.

Last year, Spotify filed an antitrust complaint with the EU about Apple's cut of payment, claiming Apple uses it to artificially inflate prices. The EU opened a formal investigation into Apple in June because of Spotify's complaint.

WordPress is open source, meaning users don't have to pay when using it to build their websites. Roughly 35% of the internet uses WordPress, according to Who Is Hosting This.

WordPress.com is the commercial arm of the business, which sells premium domain names and offers web hosting services. These options were not on offer through the free WordPress app, and so Apple's demand was seen by some as forcing WordPress to monetize a free-to-use app so as to take a cut of the payments.

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NOW WATCH: The rise and fall of Donald Trump's $365 million airline

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Pinduoduo’s latest aim: sell $145 billion farm produce in 2025

Still working to turn a profit and shake off its fake-goods reputation, China’s e-commerce upstart Pinduoduo set itself another ambitious goal for 2025: surpass 1 trillion yuan or $145 billion annual gross merchandise volume of agricultural products.

The announcement arrived with the company’s Q2 results last Friday. For some context, online sales of agricultural goods in China in 2019 neared 400 billion yuan or $58 billion, a 27% increase from the year before according to stats from the Ministry of Commerce.

It’s important to note that GMV totals the dollar value of merchandise sold through a platform without factoring in discounts, refunds, returns, and so forth, so it’s not accepted as a standard accounting term for measuring revenues. The term is, however, useful for gauging the transaction size of a budding company like Pinduoduo that is still operating in the red.

The key message here is that Pinduoduo wants to lead the digitization of China’s agricultural sector. Just 2.5% of China’s agricultural goods were distributed online last year, with over half through traditional wet markets and about a third through supermarkets, said a report from research firm iiMedia.

Pinduoduo launched in 2015 as a group-buying service for fruits and has since grown into an all-purpose e-commerce service rivaling Alibaba and JD.com. Fruits and vegetables remain a key category, as over 240 million or 38% of its annual active users bought farm produce via its marketplace in 2019.

Pinduoduo believes its ‘pin’ or ‘group-buying’ approach can help standardize growing practices and bring economies of scale to small farms. Compared to countries like the U.S. where industrial farming prevails, China is dominated by small farms, for it has far less arable land per capita. As its newly appointed CEO Chen Lei said on the earnings call:

“We combine consumer demand on our platform [to] create scale, and we can leverage consumer insights we gain to help farmers make more informed decisions across planting cycles, including what to plant and when to harvest.”

Pinduoduo’s annual report dived into more details:

“We find ‘pin’ an effective solution to aggregate consumer demand, match them with batches of agricultural produce, and mobilize China’s well-penetrated and affordable logistics capability to have perishable and fresh produce shipped directly from farms to users and bypass multiple layers of distribution. This not only enhances user experience, but more importantly, helps to turn small scale agriculture production of different quality, variety, and volume into a semicustomized batch processing mechanism. It lowers the unnecessary costs of agricultural consumption and potentially makes small scale customized services viable.”

The firm’s farming push also includes bringing agricultural experts to train farmers and investing in precision-farming technologies like robots, IoT sensors, and low-powered data transmission.

Pinduoduo’s rise hs no doubt unnerved its rivals. The upstart logged 683 million annual active buyers in the year ended this June. For comparison, Alibaba claimed 742 million China-based active consumers in the year ended March, and JD.com racked up 417 million in the year ended August.

But Pinduoduo still lags far behind the others in per-customer spending. Using annual GMV and active buyer figures, our calculation shows that JD.com recorded roughly 5,760 yuan ($833) GMV per consumer, while the average was about 8,447 yuan for Alibaba (in China) and 1,127 yuan for Pinduoduo. Produce in China has notoriously thin profit margins, so the challenge for Pinduoduo is how to achieve a healthy bottom line as it works towards its dream to transform China’s agricultural industry.

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Floating caravans: Tech for socially distant holidays

From caravans that can go on land and water to a kit that can convert your car into a motorhome.

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Here's the pitch deck deep tech firm Apheris used to persuade Twitter chair and ex-Google CFO Patrick Pichette to invest

• Berlin-based deep tech startup Apheris raised funding from institutional investors and angel investors, including Twitter chair Patrick Pichette, in a $3 million seed fundraising round.
• Apheris helps private companies navigate the complexities of local data privacy laws, allowing them to extract insights from datasets through the use of AI technology. 
• We got an exclusive look at the pitch deck Apheris used to bring investors on board. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Patrick Pichette, the chair of Twitter's board of directors and Google's ex-CFO, has backed deep tech startup Apheris in a $3 million seed funding round alongside other investors. 

Founded in 2019, Apheris helps clients analyze data without risking privacy infractions. The free flow of internal data can be a minefield for private businesses, with large bulks of valuable information remaining unusable or unshareable due to privacy, compliance, legal or security concerns.

Apheris is a software-as-a-service company and CEO and cofounder Robin Rohm told Business Insider its pricing structure depended "on the use case and the data ecosystem that it's empowered". 

"There are other companies that focus on federated machine learning to enable computing on static and structured data, but they do not enable a data scientist to do data science on third-party data," he added.

"Apheris provides an interface to data scientists that allows them to do real R&D and data science while preserving data privacy and ownership."

The firm said that, less than one year after launch, it had worked with around seven clients, including "top pharmaceutical, chemical, telecommunication, and manufacturing companies."

Seed investor LocalGlobe led the round alongside Dig Ventures and Pichette. Additional investors include another.vc, System.One, and angel investors Charles Songhurst, NaturalMotion founder Torsten Reil, and Songkick founder Ian Hogarth.

Check out the pitch deck that brought them on board below: 

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US law enforcement agencies are getting more savvy about using information collected by smart speakers and other devices as part of criminal investigations (Sidney Fussell/Wired)

Sidney Fussell / Wired:
US law enforcement agencies are getting more savvy about using information collected by smart speakers and other devices as part of criminal investigations  —  Requests are rising from law enforcement for information on the devices, which can include internet queries, food orders, and overheard conversations.

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THE INTERNET OF THINGS 2020: Here's what over 400 IoT decision-makers say about the future of enterprise connectivity and how IoT companies can use it to grow revenue

• This is a preview of The Internet of Things 2020 research report from Business Insider Intelligence.
• Purchase this report.
• Business Insider Intelligence offers even more technology coverage with Connectivity & Tech Pro. Subscribe today to receive industry-changing connectivity news and analysis to your inbox.

IoT systems and solutions are iterating rapidly, and providers are coming to meet more and more of companies' and consumers' needs.

Emerging tools and technologies like smart speakers, machine learning, and 5G are enabling huge gains to efficiency and more control at home and in the workplace.

The continued growth of the IoT industry is going to be a transformative force across all organizations. By integrating all of our modern day devices with internet connectivity, the IoT market is on pace to grow to over $2.4 trillion annually by 2027.

To give companies insight into who's using IoT solutions, who isn't, and key trends in the development and deployment of IoT projects, Business Insider Intelligence conducted its fourth annual Global IoT Executive Survey.

The annual survey, combined with past iterations of the study, offers a longitudinal look at adoption of the IoT generally, anticipated trends and their realization, and the evolution of decision-making processes alongside other points of interest in the wider space. Our survey includes over 400 responses from key executives around the world, including C-suite and director-level respondents.

Through this exclusive study and broad-based research into the field, Business Insider Intelligence details the components that make up the IoT ecosystem. We size the IoT market and use exclusive data to identify key trends in the connected devices sector. And we profile the enterprise, governmental, and consumer IoT segments individually, drilling down into the drivers and characteristics that are shaping each market.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• We project that there will be more than 41 billion IoT devices by 2027, up from about 8 billion in 2019.
• 5G networks will figure into many companies' IoT projects before the year is out, with 39% of respondents to our survey saying they plan to support 5G in IoT products and services before 2021.
• AI and machine learning are critical systems that are continually evolving to provide IoT users with the tools they need to parse mountains of data and quickly discern usable insights, while edge computing solutions are growing more central to IoT discussions and increasingly sophisticated as companies seek to reduce data transmission costs and lower latency.
• The report highlights the opinions and experiences of IoT decision-makers on topics that include: drivers of adoption, major challenges and barriers, investment plans, and the types of solutions they're employing thus far.

In full, the report:

• Provides a primer on the basics of the IoT ecosystem.
• Offers forecasts for the IoT moving forward, and highlights areas of interest in the coming years.
• Looks at who is and is not adopting the IoT, and why.
• Highlights drivers and challenges facing companies that are implementing IoT solutions.

Companies mentioned in this report include: Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Attest, Audi, AWS, Baidu, Blink, Carbon Black, China, Mobile, China UnionPay, Cisco, Cimcon, Deutsche Telekom, eero, enSilo, Ericsson, Etisalat, Foninet, Goldman Sachs, Google, Google Cloud, Honeywell, Honeywell Connected Enterprise, Huawei, Internet of Things Consortium, Intersection, Jacuzzi, Michelin, Microsoft, NEC, Nest, NXP Semiconductors, Oracle, Orange, Particle, Qualcomm, Ring, Salesforce, Sidewalk Labs, Sigfox, Singtel, SoftBank, Software AG, Sprint, STMicroelectronics, T-Systems, Telefonica, Telstra, Tenable, Tencent, Tolaga Research, Verizon, VMWare, Z-Wave, ZigBee.

Interested in getting the full report? Here's how to get access:

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now
2. Sign up for Connectivity & Tech Pro , Business Insider Intelligence's expert product suite keeping you up-to-date on the people, technologies, trends, and companies shaping the future of connectivity, delivered to your inbox 6x a week. >> Get Started
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Best tablet for remote learning in 2020 - CNET

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Payback takes place on Sunday Aug. 30, and looks to be built around the returning Roman Reigns.

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Jack Ma's Ant Group, which owns Alipay, had profits of around $3.5B in the six months to March, ahead of planned concurrent IPOs in HK and Shanghai (Stella Yifan Xie/Wall Street Journal)

Stella Yifan Xie / Wall Street Journal:
Jack Ma's Ant Group, which owns Alipay, had profits of around $3.5B in the six months to March, ahead of planned concurrent IPOs in HK and Shanghai  —  Results show how lucrative the Chinese financial-technology giant's business has been as it gears up for blockbuster offering

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Twitter hides Trump tweet behind notice for potentially dissuading people from voting

Twitter flagged one of President Donald Trump’s tweets on Monday, placing it behind a notice that warns users it violates the platform’s rules against dissuading people from voting.

In the tweet, posted on Monday, Trump claimed mail drop boxes are a “voter security disaster” and also said they are “not COVID sanitized.” Twitter’s notice says that the tweet violates its rules about civic and election integrity, but it “determined it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.” Users can still retweet it with comment, but are nor prevented from liking, replying, or retweeting it alone.

Through its Twitter Safety account, the company gave more details, saying that the tweet had been flagged for “making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting.” It also cited a section from its Civic Integrity Policy, highlighting a line that forbids users from making “misleading claims about process procedures or techniques which could dissuade people from participating” in elections.

Per our policies, this Tweet will remain on the service given its relevance to ongoing public conversation. Engagements with the Tweet will be limited. People will be able to Retweet with Comment, but not Like, Reply, or Retweet it. pic.twitter.com/USuaRr5ING

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) August 23, 2020

Mail-in ballots, which are expected to be used more widely by states in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have become a partisan issue leading up to the November presidential election. Despite what Trump said in his tweet, expert consensus is that mail-in ballots and absentee ballots are both secure. Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states COVID-19 is spread mostly through close contact from person to person. Though it is possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their mouth, nose, or possibly eyes, the CDC says this is “not thought to be main way the virus spreads.”

After years of controversy over how the platform handled the president’s tweets that contained misleading, false, or incendiary statements, Twitter has recently begun taking a harder stance on Trump’s account. In May, Twitter applied fact-check labels about mail-in ballots to two of Trump’s tweets.

Days later, Trump signed an executive order targeting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives internet companies legal protections that shield them from liability for user-created content while also giving them power to make moderation decisions. The executive order argued that platforms forfeit their rights to legal protection when they moderate content, as Twitter did when it applied fact-check labels to Trump’s tweets.

Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies

Though it is not clear if Trump’s executive order is legally enforceable, it may serve to intimidate some platforms. Twitter called the order a “reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law,” and its actions on Trump’s tweets today may indicate that the company does not see it as a threat.

TechCrunch has contacted the White House and Twitter for comment.

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