Mac and iOS Public Betas and Omni Apps

As Apple rolls out public betas for macOS and iOS, we want to remind people that those are, by definition, unfinished pieces of software, and that it’s entirely possible that you’ll run into bugs.

This is no criticism of Apple: the whole point of a public beta is to get help from the public with finding bugs.

But here’s the thing: some of those bugs might affect Omni apps. And apps from other developers too, of course. You could run into trouble getting your work done.

If you do want to run the public betas, the best way is to run them on a device other than your main device. Or, if on a Mac, you could install the beta in a separate partition.

In other words, running a public beta is great because you can help Apple find and fix bugs, which benefits everybody. But just remember that, as betas, they’re not deemed ready yet for day-to-day use.

Worth noting: we release public betas too — see our Omni Test Signups page. When we fix a compatibility issue with a macOS or iOS public beta, that fix will usually show up in one of our test builds first.