If an iOS developer beta was installed on a device that wasn’t registered, it effectively became a brick, requiring it to be wiped and restored to the last public iOS release.Īpple abandoned that requirement years ago, at least as far as beta authorization was concerned.
In the early days of iOS, before public betas were even a thing, members of the Apple Developer program had to register the hardware IDs of their devices in a portal - and Apple even limited how many devices each developer could register. The more restrictive approach would have helped Apple exercise control over who could download developer betas, which has long been its policy. On the other hand, since developer betas appeared to be restricted for the iOS 16.5 release, it’s possible Apple was toying with both approaches before settling on opening up its developer betas to everyone. We may never know if this was Apple’s intention all along, but seemingly offering the new “Beta Updates” section could have been a way to make the developer betas available to all from the outset. It’s not clear when Apple made that change, but a June 3 version of the page from the Internet Wayback Machine shows that “OS beta releases” were not included at that point. While it was clear that Apple was simplifying access to future iOS betas by eliminating the need to mess with beta configuration profiles, it seemed it would instead check beta access by Apple ID, limiting iOS developer betas to only those Apple IDs that were paid members of the Apple Developer Program, and limiting public betas in a similar manner. In fact, it’s the very opposite of what we thought Apple was up to when it changed its system for handling beta downloads in iOS 16.4.
At first, we chalked this up to a glitch on Apple’s end, but it now appears that it’s a deliberate decision on Apple’s part to open up its developer beta program far and wide. Shortly after the first developer betas landed yesterday, many folks began noticing that their devices were offering up the new betas, despite not having paid their $99/year fee for Apple’s Developer program. In a surprising twist, it appears that you no longer need to be a member of the Apple Developer Program to get access to the new developer betas for iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and more.
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