It is reported that Apple plans to completely remove the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) in future macOS updates.
After Apple launched Macintosh in 1984, it developed and launched the AFP proprietary file sharing protocol in 1985, which together with AppleTalk, AppleShare and LocalTalk hardware, formed Apple’s early network. Network ecology, supports file sharing between Mac devices in the local area network.
In the 1980s before the popularization of the Internet, AFP solved the problem of cross-platform file corruption caused by resource forks technology in early Mac software to ensure file integrity. IT Home quoted a blog post that Mac software files at that time included data fork and resource fork. If it was transmitted to non-Mac devices without compression, the resource fork was often stripped off, resulting in file damage.
With the commercialization of the Internet in the mid-1990s, Apple gradually abandoned its own protocols and turned to open standards such as TCP/IP. AFP once supported TCP/IP networks through the AppleShare IP version and was integrated into Mac OS X until OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), after which the default file sharing protocol was switched to Microsoft’s SMB.
macOS 11 (Big Sur) has removed the AFP server function, while macOS Sequoia 15.5 further announced the abandonment of AFP client support, and future versions will be completely removed. Apple recommends that users switch to SMB or use the NFS protocol for old UNIX servers.
For users who still need AFP, the third-party open source project Netatalk provides support, but since Apple has removed macOS native AFP core support, its future sustainability is doubtful.
In addition, third-party NAS manufacturers such as Synology may soon stop supporting AFP. Apple emphasized that although AFP is known for its simplicity and reliability, it has lost its practicality in the network environment dominated by TCP/IP and Windows, and it is time to retire.
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