iOS 12 developer beta 8 is now available to download

On Monday, Apple released and then quickly pulled the seventh developer beta of iOS 12, following numerous reports of major performance issues. It was a slightly embarrassing moment for Apple’s software team, especially given how close we are to the general release of iOS 12, but at least there’s good news: We get to do the whole thing over again today, just with developer beta 8 rather than developer beta 7.

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. Reports of the exact nature and cause of the problem varied: Some users found that the problems went away after simply waiting for an hour, and some people said that performance issues only affected the over-the-air update, not the version that you can download directly from Apple’s servers.

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 on Monday, so anyone on the public channel will have been spared the horrors of the developer beta.