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Who benefits from Apple’s public betas? We all do
With the release of the public betas for macOS and iOS, we venture into that undiscovered country that is called…prerelease software. (Gasp!)
The public beta program is a fairly recent development for Apple–despite a brief flirtation in the earliest days of Mac OS X–with a prerelease of Mac software first arriving in 2014 with Yosemite, and the first iOS public beta, iOS 9, a year later in 2015.
The company has of course long offered prerelease software to developers who need to build in compatibility for Apple’s newest features, but expanding that to the realm of anybody who really wanted to participate has opened up a lot of possibilities for the company, developers, and users alike. It also hasn’t been without its challenges.