// Ars Technica
On the first day of its World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple presents its keynote, where it mostly unveils its consumer-facing plans. Later, when the pundits are taking their first jab at explaining what it all means, there's the Platforms State of the Union session. At 35 minutes in, Sebastien Marineau, Apple’s VP of Core OS, dropped the following bomb: "Because IPv6 support is so critical to ensuring your applications work across the world for every customer, we are making it an App Store submission requirement, starting with iOS 9."
However, on the last day of WWDC, there was a session that put the above statement in a somewhat different light. We'll get back to that because, in the mean time, I spent a larger part of the week than I'd like to admit testing whether various applications work over IPv6.
The current state of IPv6
My first reaction was "this means no more Skype under iOS 9." Which led to some back-and-forth about whether Skype works over an IPv6-only network. The easiest way to test this is to get rid of that old, rickety version 4 of the Internet Protocol—it only has four billion addresses!—simply by turning it off in the Network pane of the System Preferences on your Mac. If there's an IPv6 router present on your Ethernet or Wi-Fi network, your Mac will then configure an IPv6 address for itself—well, two, actually—and connect to the IPv6 Internet. If there's no IPv6 router present, at least your Mac will talk to other devices on the local network over IPv6, using "link local" addresses.