Outside of smartphones (in the US, apparently), moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is genuinely painful and often requires deeper knowledge of networking to accomplish.
Yes, if you're using a smartphone or your needs are otherwise trivial (for instance, you don't have a real network at home but just have one or two devices connected to your modem), then none of this is a big deal. But outside of that, things can be very different.
Right. Those are the "trivial" cases I mentioned.
That was the only point I was making.
That's not an endorsement on my part at all, just a recognition of what has happened.
I confess that I'm doing the same thing in my home network -- I won't move to IPv6 until I have no other choice, because that move will take a ton of time, sweat, and tears.
Just to stave off misguided attacks on me: I am not saying IPv6 sucks and we shouldn't move to it. Not at all. But moving to it is a very expensive proposition.
Now I'm interested on what kind of "home network" you have that makes v6 that hard.
I'll start by acknowledging that it's larger and more complex than a whole lot of networks. I have three subnets (not counting a second WiFi AP for guest use that just routes directly to the internet and bypasses my network entirely).
I have a subnet for my 4 internet-facing servers, a subnet for devices that for one reason or another aren't capable of working through my VPN, and a subnet for my general use. This is entirely encrypted using a VPN server I also run.
I have a total of around 70 different computers and devices on the network.
When I played with moving to IPv6, two things became immediately obvious to me. The first is that it will break most of what I have going on, so I'll have to go through and debug most of the systems to make them work right again. The second is that I'll need to rethink the entire network topology (except for my "lame devices" subnet -- those devices also can't use IPv6, so I'll have to maintain an IPv4 network just for them).
Rethinking the topology is probably the part that I'm least excited about, because it seems that I'll have to essentially become an IPv6 expert to design and implement that sort of change.
In any case, I anticipate at least a week of having a broken network ("broken" meaning just basic internet connectivity) while I figure all that stuff out.