Good IPv6 host support has been a thing in almost all consumer OSes for over 10 years now. All currently supported versions of Windows, MacOS, Android[1][2] and iOS support IPv6 natively.
And, as I keep reminding HN, Windows freaking XP supported IPv6 (albeit not as a transport for DNS queries).
The problem is simply that some people don’t want to spend a couple weekends to learn a new technology (one that is old enough to purchase alcohol in all 50 states—-this is not like chasing the latest web framework).
[1] There have been various blog posts about how android is “broken by design” because it expects to configure host IP via SLAAC and receive DNS servers via RA, instead of DHCPv6. This is utter nonsense.
[2] Android did, until about 5 years ago, not like to use DNS servers with ULA prefixes (the IPv6 equivalent of IPv4 private network ranges). That’s unfortunate, but hardly a “dumpster fire”.
You probably need to care about the last couple unsupported versions, too; 5-year-old Android versions are still in the wild. Thankfully, it's a rolling window and the stuff with poor support is dropping off.
> The problem is simply that some people don’t want to spend a couple weekends to learn a new technology (one that is old enough to purchase alcohol in all 50 states—-this is not like chasing the latest web framework).
The problem, speaking as someone who spent some weekends worth of time on it, is that the technology, which has only been relevant for the last handful of years regardless of when it was first released, is not nearly that simple and works just differently enough to trip you up. (And you can't just do a full replacement and drop v4, so the differences will keep tripping you up)
Charts of IPv6 usage such as Google's tend to still show a strong "bathtub curve" with a very noticeable decline during 9-5 work hours making a pretty clear case that corporate/enterprise devices are the ones (greatly) lagging behind.
Consumer devices most directly feel the effects of NAT/CGNAT and feel much more pressured to route around that IPv4 "damage" with IPv6. Some consumer networks, especially mobile carriers in every part of the world, have moved to IPv6-predominant (if not "IPv6-only"; depending on how you feel about IPv6 to IPv4 gateways). The "Happy Eyeballs" algorithm has been in play on most Consumer OSes for several years now and consumer devices generally strongly prefer IPv6 services over IPv4 when given a dual-stack choice.
IPv6 excels on smartphone handsets since the telecom company has full control of your network/IP stack. Simple to support and manage.
However consider a home network situation, you have the consumer router, and attached to it is a bunch of devices, some which have iffy support for IPv6. They all speak IPv4 well. From an ISP perspective supporting IPv4 only makes sense because it still works and you can count on downstream devices in a home network to support it. With the impending depletion of public IPv4 addresses, ISPs can rely on CGNAT. Less burden.
Wireless router support for IPv6 is iffy too, from what I've heard.
My guess is that it is still a tiny minority of non-computer devices that will use ipv6 on the LAN side of a router.
IPv6 traffic has been at least 50% for at least the last year (based on the most convenient statistics I can grab).
Is it still? I know this was true for a while, but things seem to have been ironed out. I only occasionally have IPv6 (my ISP is doing something weird), but when I do it all seems to work fine.