Apple's Betas Are Missing Most of the Cool New Features

You might be itching to install the iOS 18 beta and try out all the new features, but this year, it might be better to wait—and not for the usual reasons.

iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 are both available now as developer betas, with the public betas coming in July. All the usual warnings apply: don't use betas on production machines, be aware that you can lose data, and so on. But this year there's another reason to hold off until later into the beta cycle—it's just not really worth bothering with yet. Plus, of course, there's Apple's now-usual ruining of one of its most important apps.

"For the average consumer, patience is a virtue, as the public beta that arrives in July will offer a more stable experience for those curious about newer features. Still, I highly recommend waiting for the official release later this year unless you’ve got multiple devices for experimentation," Steven Athwal, founder and managing director of UK refurbished phone retailer The Big Phone Store, told Lifewire via email.

Be Careful, Etc.

It used to be that only people paying Apple around $100 per year for membership of their developer plan would get access to the company's annual beta operating systems. Then Apple added the public beta program, which let anyone sign up. Now, anyone can also grab the developer betas without paying. You just have to head to the software update panel in the settings app of your Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc.

Beta software is, by its nature, unfinished. It can lose or destroy data, and even if you have a dedicated device just for testing, be careful about using it with your main Apple ID. Any data corruption on the test device may end up getting synced to your regular devices.

The public betas, which begin next month, are better for testing. For one, they have a month's worth of extra work behind them. And for another, Apple delays the public release for days or a week after the developer release of the same version. That allows time for any extra-bad bugs to appear before the public loads them onto their phones.

But even with the public betas, you can run into all kinds of trouble. For a start, essential apps might not launch at all. Banking apps are especially likely not to work, as banks might disallow them to work with untested OS versions for security reasons.

Another big risk is battery life, which is almost always worse for the majority of the beta period while other stuff gets worked on. In my experience, it's usually only the very last beta versions where battery use drops back to normal levels. That can be okay in an iPad you only ever use at home, but if you rely on your phone, it's a real pain.

Nothing to See Here

That's all standard advice for any beta testing. But this year, there's less incentive to hop on early because none of the AI tools are there, and those are surely the features people most want to try out. The Apple Intelligence features, like better Siri, won't be arriving until later, perhaps not until after the OS updates have actually launched in the fall.

"I don't think this is a good time to try the new beta in most cases. Besides the fact the first developer betas might be quite unstable, they don't have the full set of announced changes. The changes in the first beta version might change the way they work under the hood, and, as a result, the app or service might develop an inconsistent state even when the stable version of iOS 18 is out (and only fixable by resetting the device)," Serhii Popov, software engineer at MacPaw, told Lifewire via email.

Instead, what you get are the new customization options, plus some excellent privacy features. For example, you can now limit how apps access your address book, just like you can limit their access to your photo library. And it works. I have a developer friend who has limited WhatsApp access to his contact list, only allowing it to see a small subset of people instead of slurping the entirety of his true social graph into Facebook's surveillance machine. He says it works fine, although he has to restart WhatsApp every time he adds a contact.

You can also lock and hide apps and use the new Passwords app, which should make it much easier to manage passwords. Right now, you still have to dig around in the Settings app to find them.

Most fun, though, is the customization. You can change the color and appearance of app icons, and you can place those icons anywhere you like, leaving gaps if you want.

But one big reason not to test the beta is that Apple has redesigned the Photos app, and not necessarily for the better. Gone is the navigation sidebar which let you quickly access different parts of the app. Now you have to scroll around, forever, to get to these sections. It's not only annoying but also a step back in terms of accessibility. Hopefully, like with Apple's disastrous redesign of Safari in iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey back in 2021, Apple will relent and revert to the previous design.

I often update early because I have to investigate the new features for my job. But this year, I'll be holding off probably until the fall, when the official release drops, and some of that Apple Intelligence stuff is live.