Multicast entitlement for apps already there in App Store

Question

Created Jul ’23

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As I am aware in ios 14 and later version, Applications which are using broadcasting and multicasting needs to add multicast entitlement into their profile.

Our organization have an app in App Store that was deployed in 2017 which was using multicast and broadcast in which it needs to detect a device.

Now onwards, They have started the development on that application again and I had to build the code for that app, I tried deploying it in ios 16 and it was not able to detect the device. As I think I need to add the multicast entitlement in it, But when I downloaded our app from AppStore which was deployed in 2017, It was able to detect the required device and working well (off course some UI got messed up which I have to fix but detection is working fine.)

So I am not able to make sense out of this thing and one more thing arises once the ios 14 came some years back, So there were many apps who were using broadcast without having this entitlement, So did all of them stopped working in ios? or they all immediately had to give the release with this?

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Jul ’23

Apple platforms regularly implement linked-on-or-later checks for backward compatibility. Apps linked with an old SDK get the compatibility behaviour but, if you rebuild your app, and hence link with the new SDK, you have to adapt to the new behaviour.

I’m not sure if we did that for the multicast entitlement check. Frankly, it’s been a while, and the rollout of the check was kinda bumpy [1].

Still, this doesn’t really matter. The path forward here is the same regardless of the answer to that question. If your app relies on multicasts, it needs the entitlement.

For more background on this, see Local Network Privacy FAQ.

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[1] IIRC it went something like this… Initially the check wasn’t applied to BSD Sockets code. Then we fixed that in the iOS 14.x timeframework. Then we broke it again in the iOS 15.x timeframe. And in iOS 16 we finally got all the ducks to line up.

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