IPV6 or IPV4 for Wifi on my mobile app

[dfawatts]

My wife and I both have Samsung Galaxy phones, an S23 and an S24.  We noticed that the Strava app was very slow to load on both phones and didn't move into activities any faster than about 30 seconds, making it unusable at home.  This led me to switch of WiFi and all was working perfectly again with just Mobile Data (4G and/or 5G).  So the phones are good and the app is good but what's wrong with WiFi?

I did some searching and saw that others have a similar problem with Strava and other apps and the recommendations are to disable IPV6 on your home router.  This can be done at home but doesn't fix issues we will have when connecting to other WiFi spots.

Has anyone else seen this?  Is there a pending resolution? This issue is present on both the Strava Beta app and the mainstream app on these phones.

[bentawney7]

Just as an addition to this, I couldn't load Strava at all, including when I disabled IPv6 on my router.

The solution was in the app settings on my phone (i.e. Settings, Apps, Strava rather than Strava, Settings), for some reason the option "Disable on WiFi" was selected on and it only took me an hour speaking to Vodafone Broadband customer support to find this out!

[dfawatts]

Thanks, I've had a look on my phone's app settings for Strava but can't see that. I find it still works fine by having IPV6 disabled at home but if I go to somewhere else with IP6 enabled I guess I'll run into a problem

[Jane · Accepted solution]

Hello @dfawatts 

Thanks for posting about this.   You're correct that disabling IPv6 can sometimes speed up Strava, as well as other Apps and websites.  I don't have all the details on this, but my understanding is that IPv6 is not supported across the entire Internet infrastructure.  For example some ISPs (internet service providers) do not support it.  This can mean that more translations and lookups have to take place, which can cause the slowness you are experiencing.  

A colleague shared this handy tool you can use to test for IPv6 connectivity:  https://ipv6-test.com/

Below are the results i get when I run this test in my office - you can see that my ISP (Verizon) shows IPv6 as not supported.

 

I hope this helps and if any of our Community members can comment with a more detailed explanation, that would be welcome.

[dfawatts]

Hi @Jane thanks for this...Since I turned IP6 off on my router, all apps have been working really good, including Strava.  My wife and I upgraded from Samsung S10 and an S20 to the S23 and S24.  It was only when we upgraded our phones that we suffered with the slow apps.  Ordinarily, all Samsung phones that we've had have been amazing and that was even when IP6 was enabled at home.  This all makes me think it's a combination of some apps+samsung phones+IP6 that is a problem.  I'll mark this as an 'accepted solution' but would love to see if others have had similar experiences and developed alternative fixes.