Independent Publisher v1.8 was released on May 29th, 2017.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by John Maeda, Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic, along with Caroline Moore and Kjell Reigstad, two designers at Automattic who helped improve and release a new version of the Independent Publisher theme for WordPress.com: Independent Publisher 2.

After over a year and nearly 50,000 downloads on WordPress.org, the Automattic team announced that the Independent Publisher theme is now available to the millions of sites hosted on WordPress.com.