WWDC 2025 ends today, and we’ve seen all the new features on offer from Apple’s shiny glassy new iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26.
The first developer betas are available now, and anyone can sign up to try them – but you probably shouldn’t. If you’re not a developer with sacrificial test devices, exactly how long should you wait in the beta cycle before risking them on your daily drivers … ?
The answer depends on a number of factors, starting most obviously with the intersection of your impatience and attitude to risk. But no matter how curious, impatient, and risk-accepting of digital danger you may be, one piece of advice doesn’t change.
Never the first developer beta
Developer betas are always very rough, the first one especially. Most people shouldn’t even glance in their general direction for any device they rely on for daily use.
The biggest issue is third-party apps. The whole point of the developer betas is to allow app owners to find out what gets broken by the new operating systems, and to give them a chance to fix them before their users experience any of the problems.
That means you’re 100% guaranteed to find that some of your apps don’t work properly. Some will crash without warning during use, losing your work, others may not even open at all. If those are apps you rely on for your everyday personal or professional needs, you’re screwed.
But it’s not just external apps. Even though Apple itself has had a chance to troubleshoot everything, the pace of change leading up to WWDC accelerates, and things that worked just fine a few days ago may well get broken by a seemingly-unrelated change elsewhere in the OS. So even Apple apps may prove glitchy. Indeed, you may even find that really basic system things, like software keyboards, have significant bugs.
If you absolutely cannot resist, then be sure to do a full manual backup of your device immediately before beta installation. If you need to revert (and you will), the only way to do so is to completely wipe your device and start again from that backup. Fail to do that and you’ll be stuck with everything that’s broken until it gets fixed – and that can be many betas away.
For most, skip the developer betas altogether
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