We are experiencing troubles in our organization when we want to debug iOS applications on physical iPhones and iPads. Our iPhones (iPhone 16e, iOS 18.5) are not recognized by Xcode 16.4, but in the Finder they show up fine using the USB cable. We are aware, that the communication is different and there is an ad-hoc network that gets created to exchange the device profile.
Together with our IT department responsible for our security infrastructure we narrowed it down to the following reason: As we are blocking all IPv6 traffic for local networking, the iPhone cannot communicate with Xcode to make the first connection and load the device profile. As they are not planning on changing this behavior, I am reaching out to you, if there is a way to force this first handshake between Xcode and iOS device to use IPv4? Or is there any other way to enable debugging for these devices? Any ideas would be very helpful.
The device communication infrastructure requires IPv6 and relies on IPv6 link-local traffic, starting from Xcode 15. There are no IPv4 options that you can enable as alternatives. TN3158 tackles a particular slice of this that is specific for some VPN and security configurations, so your IT organization may get some value from reading through that document, though there are many other types of IT configurations that fall beyond the scope of that document.
If your company would like to get IT department level support from Apple on how to work with an IPv6 world with Apple features that rely on IPv6, they can take a look at the options available through AppleCare Professional Support.
— Ed Ford, DTS Engineer
