iOS 18 mac address rotation

Have you raised a Feedback report? If so, put the FB number here.

If you haven't, please do so.

Apple's developers don't all hang around here, and the ones who do aren't going to raise every issue anyone mentions. You must do this yourself.

This is going to be a problem for a lot of people and we probably need to raise developer awareness

Previously the setting would cause the Mac Address to rotate each time you connect to a wifi network; turn it off stopped that and your hardware address would be used (or perhaps the random one just stayed the same).

Now for iOS and MacOS there no way to stop it rotating each time you connect to anything. The new on/off switch controls whether the address rotates while you are still connected after XX minutes.

This is an absolute disaster for the following situations:

1. Networks where you want to pin a device to an IP address via DHCP Reservations so that you can QoS traffic going to that device.

2. Networks were you want to lock children to an IP Address so that you can parent control what those kids can do on the internet.

3. AirPlane and Hotel Hot Spots that you buy 5 hours of usage at high speed that link to your mac address

4. Networks with really Long DHCP lease times to ensure stablility will find that Apple Devices are consuming all their addresses.

5. Low income Private Schools (there are a lot of them in the faith communities) that use Mac Addresses to register BYOD devices for the students. Most of them can’t afford to waste money on Enterprise tech but the need a way to block all devices other than those registered and most still use MAC Address registration as ”good enough” and no matter how people say it’s not sufficient it is for 90% of the situations and it will continue to be used

On MacOS you can work around some of this by brining back the use of LOCATIONS and using Static IPs in say a home network to manage children. But iOS has no such feature.

Apple wants this to be a security feature but it’s a bad design if you can’t turn it off and it forces you to turn off security features that your regularly depend on.

While I’ll continue to develope for the new stuff there’s no way in heck I can upgrade my Children’s equipment with 18 and Sonoma ship because I’ll loose to control of my ability to centrally managed those devices.

Apple needs to implement a way to turn this feature off on a per SSID. Mac Addresses are a core tenant of networking, if you want to get “cute” with the behavior, your a hazard to the industry if you don’t allow away to return the device to the normal behavior patterns that milllions of devices around the world require to function correctly. This endeavor will turn out to be as useful as the EU’s Cookie policy which has turned web access into click this extra button to accept all cookies because 99% of the people just don’t care.

That is not acceptable at all. The owner of the device has the right to use the address of the original device if he wants It is not allowed to be forced to do otherwise. The owners of the device know what suits him.