And they were correct. If more than 10% of the population is using it, it should be supported, particularly if you are providing a service that can affect people heavily (like AP test submission).
Apple should convert to JPG or PNG when exporting the image to anywhere anytime.
The same problem happens with webp images too - totally unusable almost everywhere, even in photoshop.
Apple wants to reduce storage space photos take up. Fine - but they should convert back to a standard format when exporting the image to be used on some other system.
With that said, it seems the issue is from students that didn't upload the image from their phone (where Apple correctly converts to JPG), but rather transferred the image to their computer, then uploaded into the AP Exam.
If that's true, then this is absolutely on Apple. Why would they export in a format that literally nobody else supports. What are these people supposed to do with a folder full of HEIC formatted photos, that can't be uploaded anywhere else, edited with any program, or opened even opened on some Operating Systems?
Apple should assume nobody else uses HEIC because... well, nobody else uses HEIC.
File formats change fast. It was not too long ago PNG was the newcomer, and people were touting how much better it was than GIF for non-photographs (alpha transparency, better compression, etc.). It has been successful, and now almost all applications support it. Same thing with moving from AVI to the MPEG formats in video.
New formats are a good thing, and fast adoption of them is good for users.
The point is that we have all seen what happens when we start letting a single company dictate formats. Because the next step is "i can't believe those lazy fucking programmers can't support heic2" or whatever magical bullshit they come up with after abandoning heic1.
And it you want to talk about incompetence, I'd say pushing a format that is almost guaranteed to be incompatible with the millions of existing backends out there is profoundly stupid.
