A paragraph of my post last week about Opera Software, which makes browsers for cellphones and PCs, got a lot of notice on tech blogs. But, as often happens, the retelling of the story has created an odd snowball of misunderstanding.

I asked Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, Opera’s chief executive, about the iPhone, after he mentioned how the Opera Mini browser was popular on other smartphones. He replied that in fact some Opera engineers had started developing an iPhone version, but the company didn’t pursue it because Apple doesn’t allow products on the iPhone that compete with its own software — in this case, the Safari browser.

I wrote that, figuring it would tell iPhone owners what they really wanted to know: They are not going to be able to use Opera Mini any time soon.

Boy, was I wrong.

The discussion has been raging about how Opera came to know that its software wasn’t going to be welcomed by Apple. In particular, iPhone fans wanted to know if the company submitted a fully working version of Opera to the iPhone App Store.

So I went back to Mr. von Tetzchner for more details. He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an “internal project” of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple’s software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted.

“We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license,” Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail message.

The eagle-eyed Mac blogger John Gruber had wondered whether there was a technical issue because Opera Mini appears to run on Java, which is not available on the iPhone.

But Mr. von Tetzchner wrote that Opera has a version that runs “native” — that is without needing an environment like Java.

I’m not entirely sure why these questions stirred up the blogosphere so much. We already know that Apple does reject some applications when they duplicate functions of Apple’s own software.

Still, the attention, at least in some quarters, to the details of Opera’s plans for the iPhone highlights some of the stress that Apple has created. The company is oblique in what it tells developers in advance about what its standards are for the App Store. As a result, Apple fans and developers look to every little incident and mention of the iPhone for clues about how Apple’s App store actually works.

John Gruber wrote this very clearly last month:

Here is a complete list of what Apple must do to increase developers’ trust in the App Store system:

1. State the rules.