[mfarris]

HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard.

Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come.

When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.

[alasdair_]

>HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard.

It’s hard to call something an “open standard” if anyone who wishes to use it needs to license patents from nokia.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_F... under “licensing”)

[kbenson]

And MPEG (through MPEG-LA) has long been known to be fairly active in litigating (or facilitating litigation) of the patents they administer.

[whatatita]

> It’s hard to call something an “open standard” if anyone who wishes to use it needs to license patents from nokia.

If something needs a licence, it isn't open. I mean, it literally doesn't meet the definition of open.

What's more, if the standard was open, then that would be great, but adopting it so soon and setting it to be the default is woefully shortsighted.

[thaumasiotes]

I find it really surreal that this format is named "high efficiency image file format" when it makes no guarantees, no claims, and harbors no aspirations about efficiency. It's an encoding-agnostic container format!

[hn_throwaway_99]

You're correct, I shouldn't have said their own unique format.

Still, what matters is the reality of the situation. They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support, instead of one that virtually noone supports (yet).

And at the same time that Apple rushes to support this new standard without providing a good backwards compatible experience, they've been dragging their feet for YEARS on Safari support for progressive web app features that would let devs build truly feature-comparable web apps without being beholden to the App Store walled garden.

[oefrha]

> They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support

They do.