As Apple has eschewed Adobe’s Flash for their products they have been relying heavily on HTML5 for mobile devices now for years. As a result, the technology company has been leading the way for HTML5 adoption, especially with the advent of devices such as the iPad. GigaOM speaks to the challenges and improvement spurred by Apple,

The launch of the iPad, in particular, has been instrumental in leading this change. Despite the iPhone being HTML5-only for years, the amount of video available through the nascent web standard in January was just 10 percent. But owing to the iPad’s larger screen real estate and its propensity to be used as a video consumption device, many more publishers were forced to jump on board. At the time it was launched, just one-quarter of web video was available in an HTML5 video player. Now it’s up to more than half of all web videos.

It looks like Apple is pressing the usage of HTML5 for mobile devices because it’s much more lightweight than Flash and mobile processors just don’t have the oomph to deal with heavy CPU cycles. As mentioned in the article, even Adobe has seen the light of this issue and has recently rolled out an HTML5 player widget for serving standards-based video to devices that don’t support Flash. Insofar, though HTML5 simply acts as an alternative to Flash, not a replacement; using it’s embed-code, devices can detect the presence of alternate formats and load them when the primary is unavailable.

Reviews of HTML5 adoption itself are still mixed.

While the standard is still being built into the web, it’s still facing a lot of competition from Flash and also Microsoft’s Silverlight.