So there are two use cases for public image dissemination: 1. Lossy: JPEG fills this role; 2. Lossless: this was GIF but is now PNG; and 3. Animated: GIF. S

So there are two use cases for public image dissemination: 1. Lossy: JPEG fills this role; 2. Lossless: this was GIF but is now PNG; and 3. Animated: GIF. So for a format to replace JPEG, it must bring something to the table for lossy compression. Now that JPEG is patent-free, any new format must be similarly unencumbered. And it's a real chicken-and-egg problem in getting support on platforms such that people will start using it. I remember a similar thing happening with Youtube adding VP9 (IIRC) support as an alternate to H264, which required an MPAA patent license. The MPAA also tried to cloud VP9 by saying it infringed on their patents anyway. No idea if that's true or not but nobody wants that uncertainty. Anyway, without total support for VP9 (which Apple devices didn't have, for example) Youtube would need to double their storage space required for videos by having both codecs. That's really hard to justify. Same goes for images. You then need to detect and use a supported image format... or just use JPEG.