New OS Betas Abound for Developers
Image via Apple
06 APRIL 2022 - While new versions of operating systems for everything Apple makes will be at the center of WWDC22, there’s still plenty of life in the current operating systems, and plenty of time to improve them. To that end, Apple Insider ran a couple of stories Tuesday, highlighting the first round of developer betas for the next round of updates. One piece heralded the arrival of the first betas of iOS and iPadOS 15.5, tvOS 15.5, and watchOS 8.6, while the other told of the first beta of macOS Monterey 12.4.
MacRumors Spots New Features in Apple’s Latest Developer Betas
While we don’t know what will make it to the final releases, MacRumors has already found a few interesting points poking around the betas. Outlining some of those:
There are references to “Apple Classical.” That’s believed to be the standalone classical music app for which Apple bought and turned under the streaming service Primephonic last year.
The Apple Pay Cash part of Apple Wallet appears to be adding “Request” and “Send” buttons to make managing cash in Wallet easier.
The “iTunes Pass” in Wallet appears up for a rebrand. Value held for purchases with an Apple ID will apparently be called “Apple Balance.”
The site notes updates to SportsKit, including “TV app mentions for reporting scores for different baseball innings.” Sensible, considering the Major League Baseball play coming to Apple TV+ very soon.
One other important thing to note. If you do the beta thing and you’re using Universal Control, you’re going to need to go all-in on the betas. I saw a headline somewhere that said iPadOS 15.5 “breaks” Universal Control. It sounds, though, like everything else has to be updated as well. The MacRumors piece has Apple saying that:
...Universal Control in the new iPadOS 15.5 and macOS Monterey 12.4 updates is not compatible with machines running macOS 12.3 or iPadOS 15.4, so Apple suggests that as a workaround, users should update their Universal Control devices to the new betas.
Of course, that should only be done on developer machines or spare machines. Apple and others point out that mission critical machines are no place for software that’s not fully baked.
