VP8 is one of the two mandatory codecs in WebRTC. Not supporting it means not really supporting WebRTC properly.
If they decide to add VP9 or H.265 they can, but they need to have the basics covered.

I’m using H.264 SVC for multiparty video conferencing on a daily basis on all my Apple devices and the quality is miles above Facetime. (I use Vidyo, who powers Google Hangouts.) I think Apple needs to hurry here, because the only good things to be said about Facetime imo is that it is free and easy to use.

Luong; what is not good enough with WebRTC today? I have tried WebRTC with VP8 and HTML5 with H.264 SVC running 1080p in Chrome, I am not able to see any difference?

Luong,

WebRTC is good enough for many.

The problem for Apple, as opposed to the other 3 players, is that Google, Mozilla and Microsoft are all software companies while Apple is more of a hardware vendor who builds excellent software.

This means they have more of a headache in terms of legacy hardware they need to maintain and support as time goes by.

People would expect WebRTC to work on an iPhone 4 and on, as FaceTime is available there already. And there’s a challenge with doing that.

But I think WebRTC doesn’t like Flash, so soon or later Apple will have to think about it!