(Yicai Global) Aug. 21 -- A third-party payment app of Ant Financial's Alipay has been accused of plagiarizing some of WeChat's function's codes right after its debut.

"We have immediately modified the codes, and apologized to WeChat's app team," Alipay's mini program team said in a public letter conceding fault that appeared on its account at zhihu.com -- China's Quora-style question-and-answer platform -- admitting it directly copied WeChat's example code when writing the development documents.

Alipay's mini program officially debuted Aug. 18. The app is only available now to enterprise users in the fields of travel, health care, government affairs and convenient-for-people services, tmtpost.com reported. It will gradually open to more industries.

Shortly after its inception, commentators noted that Alipay copied WeChat's codes, with the names of WeChat's developers even mentioned in the released code documents, per the report. "The development and testing workload of is lowered if Alipay's mini app uses the same interface as WeChat's," an insider said. WeChat first outed the app installed on WeChat's platform and used without the need to download it in January.