iOS 7.1 beta 3 released by Apple

Following BGR’s exclusive report revealing that iOS 7.1 beta 3 was made available to Apple’s carrier partners on Monday, December 23rd, the company has now released its new iOS 7.1 beta build to developers. iOS 7.1 beta 3 comes following the December 13th release of iOS 7.1. beta 2, and it includes a number of bug fixes and tweaks that push the software a big step closer to being released, though it looks like it might not make its way into consumers’ hands for quite some time.

The latest available publicly available version of Apple’s mobile platform is still iOS 7.0.4.

iOS 7.1 beta 3 can be downloaded immediately as an over the air (OTA) update for users with a developer account and a compatible iOS device, including the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, iPad 2, iPad (third and fourth generations), iPad Air, iPad mini and iPad mini with Retina display. It also should be made available for download on Apple’s developer website shortly.

Apple’s full change log and release notes for iOS 7.1 beta 3 will be added to this post as soon as the document is published.

UPDATE: Here is Apple’s complete iOS 7.1 beta 3 change log / release notes:

Notes and Known Issues

The following issues relate to using iOS SDK 7.1 beta 3 to develop code.

Bluetooth

Known Issue

32-bit apps running on a 64-bit device cannot attach to BTServer.

CFNetwork

Notes

A compatibility behavior has been added to address an issue where some web servers would send the wrong Content-Length value for “Content-Encoding: gzip” content. Previously, NSURLConnection and NSURLSession would send a “network connection was lost” / NSURLErrorNetworkConnectionLost (-1005) error in this situation.

The compatibility behavior applies only if the Content-Length value exactly matches the expanded gzip’d content. It won’t apply for “off by 1” or similar miscounting.

iCloud

Fixed in iOS 7.1 beta 3

Creating a new iCloud account during setup assistant, should no longer give you an error when you enable iCloud Keychain.

Messages

Known Issue

Messages sometimes indicates iMessage send failure immediately after sending.

Workaround:Tap the error icon to re-send the message.

Music App

Fixed in iOS 7.1 beta 3

Audiobooks now play as expected.

Safari

Notes

A property, minimal-ui, has been added for the viewport meta tag key that allows minimizing the top and bottom bars on the iPhone as the page loads. While on a page using minimal-ui, tapping the top bar brings the bars back. Tapping back in the content dismisses them again.

For example, use <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=1024, minimal-ui”>.

UIKit

Known Issues

• If a UITextField or a UILabel that is baseline aligned with constraints has attributes that change after the constraints have been added, the layout may be incorrect. The exception to this is -setFont: on UILabel, which should work as expected.Workaround: Avoid making changes in UITextField or UILabel after adding baseline-alignment constraints. If you must make changes, you should remove the constraints and then reapply them afterward. Note that this is a performance hit, so don’t do it unless it is necessary.
• The backIndicatorTransitionMask from a storyboard or a xib will not be interpreted correctly at runtime.Workaround: Set the backIndicatorTransitionMask in code.