Apple Filing Protocol will soon disappear from macOS

a year ago

Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) was introduced in 1985 as part of Apple's proprietary networking suite, including AppleTalk and AppleShare.
AFP was developed to handle Mac files with resource forks, ensuring compatibility when shared over networks.
Apple later introduced AOCE and PowerTalk for collaboration, but these failed and were abandoned in favor of internet standards like TCP/IP in the mid-1990s.
AppleShare IP allowed AFP to run over TCP/IP networks, and Mac OS X continued AFP support until OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), when SMB became the default.
AFP server support was removed in macOS 11 (Big Sur), though AFP client functionality remained via Finder.
macOS Sequoia 15.5 has deprecated AFP, signaling its eventual removal in a future macOS version.
Users are advised to transition to SMB for file-sharing, with NFS as an alternative for UNIX servers.
Third-party NAS vendors like Synology still support AFP, but this is likely to end soon.
Netatalk is an open-source AFP alternative, but its future is uncertain due to Apple's removal of native AFP support.
AFP was reliable and easy to use but is now obsolete in a TCP/IP and Windows-dominated world.

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