In reply to Miroslav Glavic.

Knowing the WordPress version and PHP version of plugin users is incredibly helpful for development purposes, and it benefits you to share that anonymously with the developer.

Here’s an example of this in real life:
We had a function in Accessibility Checker that had to be rewritten for PHP 8 because what we were previously using was deprecated in 8 and caused an error on the admin posts screen. But the function that we changed to was not supported in older versions on PHP (below 7). This means that when we released the fix we would add support for PHP 8, but we would have to remove support for PHP 5.6 and any sites that were running on 5.6 would no longer work with our plugin.

We identified the problem in 2021, but we reviewed the charts showing the PHP versions for sites with our plugin active there were a larger number than we expected. If we had not had this data, we would have just released the fix, added support for PHP and updated our minimum PHP version to 7.0, breaking all these sites in the process.

Given that PHP 5 end-of-life was January 1st 2019 and WordPress’ minimum requirement is PHP 7.4, we could have done this and it would have been safe to assume there were no sites on 5.6. But it would not have been a good experience for what turned out to be not a tiny number of users. Since we had access to the PHP version data, it allowed us to realize we needed to take a different approach and first warn users first, then delay the release to earlier this year.

Usuage data is not about spying on you. It’s incredibly helpful in ensuring that developers are creating better products for your website and ensuring that their plugin has maximum compatibility for the most common use cases.