Public betas are terrific and makes everyone happy. The public is happy to be able to play with the next version way ahead of everyone else. The system owners are happy to get valuable feedback of beta systems hoisted upon masses without being liable for their quirks, issues, and just plain not-quite-there-yet (see Apple Maps launch with iOS 6). However, after participiating in the iOS 9 Public Beta it feels like a joke to be asked to participate again.
This is just my personal experience with participating quite actively in the iOS 9.0 Public Beta. I reported many issues from serious bugs to minor visual inconsistencies. Beta update after update, most of these issues remained and there was never a response or update on any issue. This is probably to be expected since it’s a huge company with tons of testers. The annoyance is still seeing these reported bugs in the current iOS when version 10 is now in Public Beta.
Several issues still crop up and have probably been around before iOS 9 like the text editing loupe is still finicky (probably since it’s introduction in iPhone OS 3), Reminders is still unwieldy with sync issues (a pet peeve), and a serious issue since the launch of iOS 9 was never fixed until iOS 10. My guess is that Public Beta is not so much about getting direct feedback from the public but collecting gobs of system logs and crash reports without the user even knowing. (Is the Feedback app just a thing to help people feel like they are doing something when it actually goes to /dev/null?)
It’s now funny to hear reports of iOS 10 Public Beta as having a lot of rough edges. My guess is many of those rough edges will never get fixed. Hopefully I’m wrong.
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