August 29, 2019

Beta Confusion.

My iOS devices running the iOS 13 beta tried to upgrade to Public Beta 1 of iOS 13.1 this morning. I wasn’t about to allow a “public beta 1” on any of my devices, as they often have lots of bugs and battery issues, so I decided to stick with iOS 13 Public Beta 8 until the official release of iOS 13.

It looks like that’s going to happen around September 10.

I’m a little confused as to Apple’s thinking around having overlapping betas like this. Personally I’m not a fan of the public beta program at all, but that’s just the old school developer in me. I think back to the days of “Windows Longhorn”, when you had to be pretty special to try out the pre-beta version of Windows Vista before it was released to the masses.

I’m a little concerned about Apple’s testing practices and their new habit of promising features in a new release and then pulling some of the new features out to release them in a .1 release a little later in the timeline. This is what Apple is doing with iOS 13.0 vs iOS 13.1.

It’ll be intriguing to see what is actually released with the announcement of the new iPhones in a couple of weeks.