Apple was forced to pull a high-speed about-face on Monday afternoon, after it was discovered that the seventh iOS 12 developer beta contained a number of performance bugs that were rendering devices useless. The IPSW manual download file is still available on Apple’s developer site, but the over-the-air updates that anyone with the developer profile can use have been pulled.
The performance issues appeared to break simple things, like app launches. On my iPhone X, I found that apps would take ten times longer than usual to load when launched, and the lock screen and system animations appeared to be frequently hanging.
Performance issues are, of course, the name of the game with beta versions of any software, but particularly iOS. Apple specifically warns people on the developer beta channel not to install the software on daily-driver devices — advice that people routinely ignore, of course, but you can’t blame Apple for not warning you!
The slightly safer option, as always, is to stick on the public release version of the iOS betas. Public betas are typically the same as the developer betas, just launched one week later so that any glaring bugs can be nipped in the bud. Notably, there was no public beta release today, so anyone on the public channel will have been spared the horrors of the developer beta.
Hopefully, an updated iOS 12 developer beta 7 will be landing soon, and anyone who already downloaded the update can get some bugs fixed. If you have a device that’s been rendered unusable by the latest developer beta, the sad news is that the only surefire way to fix things is to flash a restore image, because you definitely remembered to back up your device before jumping to the beta, right?
