Of Course iOS 7 is Broken, it's Beta

Apple gave the public its first preview of iOS 7 last week during its annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. A beta version just for iOS developers was released the same day, and it found its way to many people outside of that group who promptly started complaining about stability issues, non-functioning features, poor battery life, interface problems, broken third-party apps, and more. Of course iOS 7 has problems; it's beta software.

iOS 7 has bugs. That's because it's still beta software.iOS 7 has bugs. That's because it's still beta software.

The big issue is that many people seem to have forgotten exactly what “beta” means: software in development that isn't fully baked yet. It isn't ready for general use, but is being actively tested to find and fix bugs.

Apple dealt with a similar problem when Siri, it's voice control feature in iOS 6, first launched. The company clearly stated the feature was still in beta testing, but that didn't stop the barrage of complants over voice recognition failures. In that case, maybe waiting until Siri had more development time would've been prudent, but that would've delayed the release and ultimately slowed its progress since fewer people would have been involved in the testing process.

In contrast, Apple hasn't released iOS 7 to the general public, and the company made it clear there are still a few months before it officially launches. The OS will continue to improve over the coming weeks, broken features will be fixed, missing features will get added, and hopefully interface inconsistencies will get ironed out.

The bottom line is that iOS 7 isn't ready for daily use, and that's OK. It's beta software, and the only people that should be using it are in Apple's own Developer Program, and they most likely aren't running it on mission critical devices.

If you are using iOS 7 and find problems, complaining to the world about how Apple software is crap and this wouldn't have happened if Steve Jobs were alive won't help. File a bug report instead. That'll help Apple find where the problems are and give us a better over all experience when iOS 7 ships this fall.

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