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IPv6 Client Support

1 post · Oct 2015

What this trail covers

Spotify has been progressively enabling IPv6 support across its client applications to address the growing adoption of IPv6 by mobile carriers and to meet potential App Store requirements. This effort began with the Android client to mitigate connectivity issues caused by IPv4-to-IPv6 translation (CLAT) failures, and has since expanded to the iOS client. The long-term goal is to achieve end-to-end IPv6 support, including backend services.

All Spotify trails
  1. Oh IPv6, Where Art ThouThis post details the technical challenges and solutions involved in enabling IPv6 support for the Spotify Android client. Key technical contributions include extending the client's internal IP-address type to support IPv6, fixing assumptions about IP address size, rebasing and updating existing IPv6 patches, and modifying the hostname resolution strategy to rely on the OS's default address selection (RFC3484) rather than random selection to avoid unstable CLAT connections. A simple IP address blacklist was also implemented for failed connections. The post also announces the upcoming rollout of IPv6 support for the iOS client.