Apple making some developers miserable in June
On a planet with roughly seven billion inhabitants an outdated internet protocol (IPv4) that only supports four billion addressable IP addresses was destined to become yesterday’s news at some point. IPv6 was created to address this limited addressing issue with the ability to have up to 340 undecillion addressable IP addresses.
If I did this right, that number is 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addressable IP spaces, or about 486,117 usable addresses for each person on the planet at the moment. This is more than enough space to address every single internet of things device on the planet as people really want to read your refrigerator’s deep thoughts on its own self-served blog.
IPv6 was supposed to have been adopted a while back, it got pushed forward, and now it seems that starting in June Apple is going to not allow apps into the app store that use hard coded IPv4 addresses. This means if a developer has a hard coded IPv4 address in their app or IPv4-only APIs Apple will not let it onto the play store.
For most this really isn’t going to affect anything. For developers who run back end servers for their apps, this means perhaps it’s time to stock up on some Costco-sized headache medicine.
From what I am seeing if you as an end user don’t have IPv6 it’s probably not going to negatively impact you. The only thing this is going to do is cause your developer who barely got their IPv4 web backend running to pound their head against a keyboard as they try and remove any hard coding and get the thing either IPv6 compliant or rigged again.
It’s probably a good move in the long run. Got nothing particularly against it.
[ZDNet]
