Apple says all apps must support IPv6-only networking by June
Apple in an announcement Wednesday reminded developers of an upcoming change to App Store policy that requires all iOS apps include support for IPv6-only networking.
Come June 1, all submissions to Apple's App Store must be compatible with IPv6-only standards, the latest internet protocol version for hardware identification and network routing. The company first announced iOS 9 would be transitioning to IPv6-nly network services at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference.
According to an announcement on Apple's developer website, many existing apps are already compatible as the protocol is supported by NSURLSession and CFNetwork APIs. Developers using IPv4 APIs or hard-coded IP addresses will need to modify their app code to comply with Apple's new policy.
For Apple, the switch to IPv6 comes amidst wider industry acceptance of the protocol, especially from cellular carriers running networks on which iPhone and iPad operate. The proliferation of internet-connected devices, accelerated with the introduction of smartphones, is quickly depleting IPv4 address allotments. IPv6 is a successor technology and is expected to replace IPv4 in the near future.
Apple offers a set of tools for testing IPv6 network compliance as part of its developer program. In its post on Wednesday, the company pointed developers to a technical paper detailing methods of building in support for IPv6 DNS64/NAT64 networks, and linked to a WWDC 2015 session video entitled "Your App and Next Generation Networks."
Come June 1, all submissions to Apple's App Store must be compatible with IPv6-only standards, the latest internet protocol version for hardware identification and network routing. The company first announced iOS 9 would be transitioning to IPv6-nly network services at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference.
According to an announcement on Apple's developer website, many existing apps are already compatible as the protocol is supported by NSURLSession and CFNetwork APIs. Developers using IPv4 APIs or hard-coded IP addresses will need to modify their app code to comply with Apple's new policy.
For Apple, the switch to IPv6 comes amidst wider industry acceptance of the protocol, especially from cellular carriers running networks on which iPhone and iPad operate. The proliferation of internet-connected devices, accelerated with the introduction of smartphones, is quickly depleting IPv4 address allotments. IPv6 is a successor technology and is expected to replace IPv4 in the near future.
Apple offers a set of tools for testing IPv6 network compliance as part of its developer program. In its post on Wednesday, the company pointed developers to a technical paper detailing methods of building in support for IPv6 DNS64/NAT64 networks, and linked to a WWDC 2015 session video entitled "Your App and Next Generation Networks."
Comments
Edit:
After reading the technical paper linked in the article. It makes more sense and can still support IPv4 through a secondary IPv4 DNS server, that only works with named services not hard coded IP addresses. That is not such a big issue since almost every server has a name, or at least should have.
Doesn't Skype use/require IPv4?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_DNS_lookup
the pointer domain name corresponding to the IPv6 address 2001:db8::567:89ab is b.a.9.8.7.6.5.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.8.b.d.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address
172.16.254.1 (IPv4)
2001:db8:0:1234:0:567:8:1 (IPv6)
Human readability is a huge factor, there was no reason to switch to hexadecimal nor to colons. There was no reason to use that many digits. 340 trillion, trillion, trillion is about a trillion trillion more than needed.
If they had just added a single string up to say 8 characters to the front of IPv4, people would have dropped IPv4 overnight. They could have said IPv6 is now like apple:255.255.255.255 and Apple owns all ~4 billion numbers after the string apple. Only major institutions would reserve the strings. Amazon would own all ~4 billion after the string amazon. Existing IPv4 numbers could have been cast automatically to a:255.255.255.255. The string variations with just case-insensitive letters would give over 208 billion combinations then multiplied by ~4 billion for 832 billion billion options, which is still over 832 billion times what the internet is using.
I have to disagree the addresses are increased dramatically but that will mean a viable IP solution for years to come. This effectively allows an address for anything on the planet, Mars and anywhere else we go. The approach is very forward looking if you ask me something the IT world isn't all that good about. IPv6 is one of the few things that seems to have been done right not just for the present but well into the future.
The complaints I've heard seem more like the whining associated with the Python 2 crowd that makes every excuse possible to stay on Python 2 instead of pulling on their big boy pants and switching over to the vastly improved Python 3.
Those kluge and all sort of limitations in what you can or cannot do with them are now becoming almost unbearable in this hyper-connected world; just handoff between networks is a huge mess it doesn't need to be these days.
Adding string prefixes opens up all kinds of problems and another gold rush for owning a limited number of language based names. When we start thinking about addressing nanobots and all the other things we will create in the future 832 billion is not nearly enough.
Your thinking is the same as that of the DARPA engineers in the 70's, which has caused our current IP address exhaustion. It's better to have too many addresses than too few.
AI doesn't support IPv6 yet, maybe it's about time? Maybe switch (again) from this abysmal forum software to something decent at the same time?
There really is no excuse, except pure greed in not wanting to put one engineer on that for a few months (tops) maybe..
It's not like IPV6 is something nobody knew was coming, it was old news a long long time ago (likely years before any other ADSL modems were ever conceived)
If you can call no-one being able to roll it out en masse for the past 20 years "sooner".
Converting to IPv6 was always seen as being too hard, and the longer we delayed it, the harder it got.
I say that IPv6 is all the more reason to make dynamic IPs even more dynamic. Obfuscate all traffic.