probably because Apple doesn't have hardware acceleration for vp8. They don't want developers to use it. It'll be an inferior UX. Less battery, hotter device.

It's a bit arrogant for them to compare battery life of h264 to vp8, as they've chosen not to support hardware accelerated vp8. All Android devices have had this for years.

I'm hoping this all settles out with av1. Netflix and Amazon will support av1, so that doesn't leave Apple with much choice.

The Intel chips that Apple uses support VP8 decoding since Broadwell and encoding since Cherryview/Braswell. On the mobile side, it was their conscious decision not to support it, just like they newer supported the free audio codecs or container formats either.

Because Apple had significant stakes in MPEG-LA and VP8 and its descendants were a significant threat to its licensing revenues. Thankfully the HEVC fiasco and AV1 have forced them to accept that MPEG is heading towards irrelevance, but I don't expect them to implement support for VPx codecs any time soon. The only thing left is to wait for AV1 to mature and begin being implemented in hardware.

Honestly I don't care much about AV1, I am hardly going to own AV1-capable hardware in less than 5-10 years anyway. What I really want is OPUS to work everywhere (HTML audio tag in web browsers, message-attached audio files in messengers (Telegram), iTunes) and possibly VP8(webm)-encoded "gifs". I have converted my whole lifetime collection of MP3s (some hundreds gibs) to OPUS to save space (and put a big collection of audio books on my Android phone) and now I have to convert them back every time I want to let my wife listen to something on her iPhone, iPad or MacBook (there is VLC for this on Mac yet lack of web browser support is still a pain).

I've seen many mentions OPUS is going to be everywhere, Apple included, years passed and it still is not, not even in the fresh models that were meant to have it in hardware.

Opus works in macOS natively in QuickTime, but only if contained in a CoreAudioFormat container (.CAF). Tested on macOS Mojave, it works. They simply never implemented any kind of support for OGG.

macOS us the least of a problem. I don't even see a reason to use QuickTime when there is VLC that supports everything. The real deal are iOS and web browsers on both macOS and iOS. IIRC I've tried CAF in Chrome and Safari but neither worked.

Sadly until they implement the OGG container there isn't a lot to do about Opus on iOS. They could also gasp consider adding support for Vorbis and Theora, but I think they would rather stop making computers than do it at this point.