“In an effort to eliminate bugs from upcoming iOS versions ahead of their general releases, Apple plans to launch the first-ever public beta program for the iOS operating system, according to multiple people briefed on the plans,” Mark Gurman reports for 9to5Mac.
“Following the successful launch of the OS X Public Beta program with OS X Yosemite last year, Apple intends to release the upcoming iOS 8.3 as a public beta via the company’s existing AppleSeed program in mid-March, according to the sources,” Gurman reports. “This release will match the third iOS 8.3 beta for developers, which is planned for release the same week.”
Gurman reports, “Apple then expects to debut iOS 9 at its June Worldwide Developer Conference, with a public beta release during the summer, and final release in the fall.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Excellent.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015
It sounds nice, it really does. But with the first release of Mac Yosemite, there were still plenty of bugs, and even new bugs with the responsiveness of voiceover and the speech synthesis system.
Sent from my iPhone
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No “but”… this is intended to correct those issues.
No, Yosemite was released as a public beta for months before official release, and *still* shipped with serious problems (some of which have yet to be resolved).
At issue here is a growing quality control problem, and Yosemite’s public beta experiment didn’t help. There’s no reason to believe an equivalent iOS program will.
Apple used to wait until it was good enough to release it. Now they’re slavishly bowing to a release schedule like countless other other companies that release half-baked software.
This isn’t a good thing.
If I keep getting “webpage had to be reloaded” one more time I’m going to snap my iPad air in half!
Apple iPads, especially pre-iPad Air 2, do not contain enough RAM.
Restart your iPad more frequently or upgrade to a new iPad.
Holding the power button until the ‘slide to power off’ item comes up, powering off and letting it shutdown, then “restarting” it does nothing. If you double-click the home button before and after all of the same apps are running or sitting or whatever they are doing in the background just like they were before the power down.
Quit everything first. Then do the hard reset.
Oooooo. video doing that, post it on YouTube, and there will be your 15 minutes of fame and the online hysteria about an Apple product!!
iPad snap gate!! :0
It’s not your iPad’s fault.
As Apple will tell you:
– BACK UP your device before installing any beta.
– Only beta test on NON-production devices.
– Expect the device to be bricked during beta testing. Plan accordingly.
Two of the beta releases of OS X 10.10 Yosemite did indeed brick my Mac Mini 2011. I had to wait and do a clean install of a repaired beta version to boot to my test partition.
Also, don’t beta test unless you’re prepared to take the time to report bugs to Apple, and have the patience to put up with Apple’s often incredibly slow response rate. IOW: It can be very frustrating.
As long as users can downgrade from public betas if something goes wrong, this is great.
IIRC developer betas warn that you can’t. In the past part of the problem was that firmware updates for some specific component (e.g. cell radio) could not be reversed for some reason.
Did they say why they’re skipping 8.2?
They’re not skipping release of 8.2, it’s already in its 5th developer beta so it should be publicly released within a month or two.
Public betas will start happening with iOS 8.3.
Why would Apple skip iOS 8.2?
Likely because Microsoft skipped Windows 9.
Apple seems to me more interested in following than leading these days. When MS went to flat saturated Metro tiles, Ive when to an grey and white ugly flat tiles-look.
Only after Pandora and others pushed shitty streaming did Apple decide to blow billions on it.
Only after Nike and Fitbit and Samsung and others launched successful wrist accessory watch-like gizmo sales did Apple decide to play game — by dusting off the click wheel and making every indication that it will be sold at insanely overinflated fashion prices.
Only after the Surface and other origami computers started selling did Apple start rumors of a MaxiPad… still undelivered.
Come to think of it, Apple is more successful these days at rolling out vaporware and car rumors than actual new products that improve the value to the user greater than what Apple offered with its products 5 years ago.
I love this idea. But public betas of Yosemite did nothing to stop the issues we are still seeing with WiFi. I want iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 to maintenance releases. Fix what should work well (WiFi is pretty important) and refine everything else. I pay for the best and I want the best.