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Fifth public beta of iOS 13, iPadOS 13, tvOS 13 now available

iOS 13's 'Dark Mode'

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A day after the most recent developer beta of tvOS 13, iOS 13, and iPadOS 13, Apple has made the same build available for public beta testers.

Participants of Apple's public beta program can download the latest versions to their devices as an over-the-air update, via Settings > General > Software Update. Members of the public interested in trying out the next-generation operating systems can sign up for the program by the official website.

This new batch of releases is functionally similar to the developer beta versions, which saw the fourth builds of both iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 provided for testing on Wednesday.

Both AppleInsider and Apple itself strongly recommend users don't install the betas on to "mission-critical" or primary devices, as there is the remote possibility of data loss or other issues. Instead, testers should install betas onto secondary or non-essential devices, and to make sure there are sufficient backups of important data before updating.



12 Comments

zimmie 10 Years · 651 comments

With macOS in particular, I'd say the possibility of data loss is a bit higher than "remote". They are mucking around in the very low levels of the filesystem building a separate OS volume from the user data volume, then adding transitive links between the two so they look like one volume. If something goes wrong with this, it has the potential to go very, very wrong.

Long-term, this work should result in future OS-level work being vanishingly unlikely to cause user data loss. The goal is for the OS volume to be read-only. This allows things like staged upgrades and rollback, where you build a whole new OS volume on the drive and point the system to that. If things don't work properly, you point the system back to the previous OS volume, and everything is back to the way it was on that version.

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zimmermann 10 Years · 350 comments

My iPhone 6s on iOS 13 is a complete new phone, fast! I even believe even the battery lasts longer. 

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JinTech 10 Years · 1075 comments

My iPhone 6s on iOS 13 is a complete new phone, fast! I even believe even the battery lasts longer. 

A colleague of mine has the beta on the iPhone XS Max and I was very impressed how fast it performs on the phone. Glad to see Apple giving even older models more juice!

davgreg 10 Years · 1053 comments

zimmie said:
With macOS in particular, I'd say the possibility of data loss is a bit higher than "remote". They are mucking around in the very low levels of the filesystem building a separate OS volume from the user data volume, then adding transitive links between the two so they look like one volume. If something goes wrong with this, it has the potential to go very, very wrong.

Long-term, this work should result in future OS-level work being vanishingly unlikely to cause user data loss. The goal is for the OS volume to be read-only. This allows things like staged upgrades and rollback, where you build a whole new OS volume on the drive and point the system to that. If things don't work properly, you point the system back to the previous OS volume, and everything is back to the way it was on that version.

I usually do the betas on Mac OS but skipped this year. Given what you are reporting, that seems prudent.

I have been running the iPad OS Beta from the first and it is pretty solid. Little things but nothing too worrisome. 

sgordon 12 Years · 56 comments

iPadOS been great since first public beta. iOS 13 on iPhone X not so much. Waited for the second public beta and I’ve found it very buggy and every so often grinding my iPhone X into the ground. Only installed it on my phone after seeing how nice and stable the iPadOS was...

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