I disagree. Bowing down to the whims and fancies of corporations is how we got into this situation (in terms of media formats) in the first place. According to wikipedia, HEIC isn't even supported in any browser natively, clearly rolling it out this soon was a bad idea.
Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere.
Apple's approach of automatically converting images at the edges is the right way to go. It does require your software to be explicit about what media formats it understands. This is where the College Board failed.
Their approach to supporting the new formats is actually quite easy to work with and properly defined input tags will just automagically trigger file conversions on the iOS side.
I also really dislike Apple's usual "my way or the highway approach" (it's causing my nephews serious issues since some of their remote learning tools use flash which Apple refuses to support) but in this case they are using the right approach to make it a smooth transition.
> it's causing my nephews serious issues since some of their remote learning tools use flash which Apple refuses to support
That's really not Apple's problem. Flash Player is dead. Adobe has declared that all support for the plugin will end in December 2020, and every major web browser has indicated that they intend to discontinue support for the plugin in advance of that date. Some desktop browsers (including Chrome and Firefox) have already disabled Flash content by default, and the Flash plugin for Android was discontinued in 2012.
As a developer I'm totally onboard with Flash having died a while back - and these tools educational suites really shouldn't have anything to do with Flash... All that said, when Apple killed Flash they did it unilaterally and really did break a lot of existing systems, if this pandemic was happening a decade ago I'd absolutely be on an Apple hate train since the sudden drop of support forced people to scramble.
At this point though, Flash is known to be dead and buried and folks that haven't migrated off of it have made their own beds[1].
1. ...And unfortunately caused a lot of headache for quite a few parents with multiple children that are trying to let all their children learn concurrently on different devices they have around the house.
> when Apple killed Flash they did it unilaterally and really did break a lot of existing systems
What are you referring to when you say "when Apple killed Flash"?
The big outcry was back when Apple made it clear that they would never add Flash support to iOS. But that support never existed in the first place -- one can hardly "kill" something which was never alive.
Desktop Safari still supports Flash, for now. It's off by default (with a "click to enable" icon), but that's no different from how it's handled in other browsers. All signs indicate that they intend to remove Flash support with the next major release, but that just puts them on the same track as everyone else.
Refusing to support the tech on your platform is killing it. iOS's big selling point, initially, was as a consumption device - a phone with a browser. Deploying your browser without flash was removing some expected support from the norm expected of a browser at that time.
And yea - I agree that flash is dead at this point and I'm quite happy it's gone. Apple actually contributed significantly to the death of flash based advertisements and there is nothing in the world I hated more than those.
Open competition among standards is the way adoption has mostly happened at least since the VHS/Betamax days. Otherwise it’s decision by committee and/or fiat which can sometimes be a net benefit but more often than not standardizes on a cumbersome standard that is not a good fit for any one application.
