Here’s an older post about the history of WordPress APIs from Automattic’s mobile apps development team that you may not have seen before. (New to me.) It explains the technical background of the current entanglements of .org, .com, and Jetpack:
Why don’t we support a single API in our apps? Wouldn’t that make our lives easier? We could have decided to support only WordPress.com, but that would exclude the broader WordPress community that host their sites on other hosts. Another solution was to only use the API for WordPress.org sites, but that would limit the functionality of the app for the WordPress.com users.
Previously, I assumed all WordPress mobile apps were fully under Automattic’s wing, although I was vaguely aware of (some of) them as part of the WordPress core project. (WordPress and WooCommerce, not Jetpack — or Simplenote.) It has been easy to assume this — until this week’s news about the future of the WordPress and Jetpack apps.
Moving forward, now that the WordPress .com+.org app is becoming more clearly the WordPress.org app, the team contributing to it in the future will need to reflect that, with more community contributors.
