Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

> Basically, only Apple (and, more recently, Samsung) use the HEIC format — most other websites and platforms don’t support it. Even popular Silicon Valley-based services, such as Slack, don’t treat HEICs the same way as standard JPEGs.

This is the key part. Many in the software industry still believes that the start-up mindset of break things move fast applies to us. The economy depends on software, governments depend on software, education depends on software, lives depend on software ... but we treat software as a toy where a new fancy image format is a reasonable change to make because our platform gets a little more fancy and for sure a little less compatible to lock-in users.

I am all for regulation, and it is coming, as the software industry has shown to be an immature risk-taking mess. But, it can be a more bearable amount of regulation if we exercise some level of self-constraint on how we break each new release of software.

If we keep blaming traditional business (education, accounting, grocery stores, etc.) for not "updating fast enough" to new trends, they are going to justly react to our demands on their thin margin profits and ask the government to stop us. When you do not know if your business will survive another month, to have to invest non-stop in new software without any tangible benefit is an unreasonable demand.

Software has become too important the past twenty years. It is time that as a industry we realize that and act accordingly.

I don't feel like Apple adopting a new format inherently means they're moving fast and breaking things. The work on HEIF started in 2012, and Apple has used it since 2017. 8 years isn't exactly a breakneck speed.

First off, they do a good job of converting it to a JPG when necessary. They've thought about backwards compatibility.

Secondly, if we didn't move forward, we'd never see any innovation. HEIF is smaller and allows for cool features like Live Photo.

Lastly, iOS is the second most popular phone operating system on the planet, and evidently they're asking students to take a picture of their answers with their phone. Is it not reasonable to expect the College Board to test it?

JPEG2000 is... 20 years old and almost no one outside of specialized applications uses it either.

"Innovation" is about the last thing you want in an interchange format. Old and boring works every time.

(Opinion of someone who maintains legacy software and has suffered from far too many breaking changes.)