Hacker News Reader

Comment by olliepop | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested, please be warned that these betas are extremely buggy. I don't mean 1 or 2 bugs experienced per day, I mean a bug in almost every minute of interaction. You will incur severely reduced battery life and many broken apps, particularly on the iOS beta. On the upside, this is an invaluable preview particularly for an app developer or Apple enthusiast.

At the very least you should back up your device first so that you can roll back if necessary - officially there is no other way other than performing a factory reset.

View on HN

I have been running the betas on 2 laptops and 1 iPhone since they came out.

I had my main laptop crash exactly once - and I think it was due to a buggy kext trying to force its way into the kernel. It hasn't happened again.

There have been a few aesthetic bugs related to the automatic handling of dark/light mode, which can now be enabled without external help (I used to rely on f.lux to get dark mode in the evening). These are pretty benign and don't cause me trouble.

Other than that, macOS Catalina has been smooth sailing, even at compiling software, installing stuff via homebrew, developer tooling - I do mostly Python and Golang stuff but Ruby has been rock solid too.

iOS 13 also brought me a few visual bugs which don't (gah) bug me too much, and I had a few app crashes but nothing horrible either. My bank apps don't work on it yet so I'm currently relying on desktop browsing or other banks, depending on the situation. Not a huge deal either.

Battery life doesn't seem to be suffering on either platform, differently from my experience with previous betas.

If you are “using macOS High Sierra or later on an APFS-formatted startup disk”, you can create additional APFS volumes on the startup disk and install the beta there.

That way, you can switch between your ‘normal’ OS and the beta, and reverting is a matter of deleting the volume you created for the beta (https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208891)

Of course, that is riskier than installing on a separate disk or even Mac, as the beta PS could easily damage both volumes.

I keep reading and hearing what you're saying, but I have been running iPadOS since beta 1 and iOS since beta 2 without many issues. If these are considered so buggy that we need warnings, then we really have been spoiled with the high quality of production releases.

Bugs I've seen:

- Random graphical artifacts/issues related to dark mode.

- BT sometimes disconnects/reconnects - is this really any different than BT normally? ;) - just hit play again usually works.

- Camera app occasionally crashes.

- Tapping the lock screen with the pencil brings up the last note, but sometimes I still have to FaceId to make the note editable.

Battery life has seemed slightly worse to fine.

It's good to remember this is beta software, but the adjectives used to describe the poor quality of this beta have been a little over the top IME.

I can’t type with a third party keyboard on ios beta. Or let’s say I can type once every 30 times. So at this point I’m must using the native ios keyboard and I hate it. That puts me in the “it’s very very buggy” camp.

I flashed an iPad air with iPad is, and within 2 minutes after the onboarding flow, it completely locked up and would not recover, had to be hard rebooted. That's pretty buggy.

In the case of macOS, you can install it on a separate APFS volume [1] without touching your current installation.

I have been using it to test the new features in Xcode 11/ iOS 13, and it has spared me many headaches.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208891

Just want to be the one person to reply corroborating this opinion as my experience with the iOS 11 and 12 betas meant frequent crashes and absolutely terrible battery life.

From what I’ve heard the first public betas of 11 and 12 were quite stable compared to this.

Which is fine, betas are not supposed to be bug free. But people who had great experiences with the 11 & 12 public betas might be lulled into a false sense of safety.

I skipped iOS 13 beta 1, but I installed beta 2 and I haven’t had any major problems. There was a problem in my banking app, which they fixed, and I get some odd audio things here and there, but otherwise it’s relatively fine.

But that’s just my experience.

Of course everyone's experience will vary, but I've been using macOS Catalina, iOS 13 and watchOS 6 as my main OSes since WWDC Day 1.

No catastrophic bugs or crashes so far. Everything seems performant, but I feel that battery charge lasts less than it should/did.

One serious bug is that App Store apps cannot seem to update, or even be installed on the Mac.

I've just installed the iOS 13 public beta, and I can confirm that certain things are definitely a bit buggy (especially autocorrect, not sure what's up exactly but it's being annoying).

However, based on my experience with the iOS 11 and 12 betas, I'm confident that most of the issues will be fixed pretty quickly.

This isn't my experience at all. I've been running iPadOS since WWDC and have had only a few very minor bugs. There are a couple of apps that won't run (one game that hard locks the whole OS is pretty bad) but in terms of the OS itself, very few bugs.

The most annoying bug is that at the moment one cannot print from the share sheet. For me, just nothing happens. Besides that, some layout/UI issues and FaceID sometimes needing a second try, it’s really stable.

Running iPadOS since it was made publicly available. Very few bugs, nothing like what you describe.

Surprised to read this, as they have been very solid here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com