Last year Apple unveiled OS X Yosemite and said that it would allow one million people from the general public to sign up for a public beta program that would provide them with the same beta releases that registered developers get. There was overwhelming response from the public and it didn’t take long for Apple to fill out those one million spots. So not only did registered developers get pre-release OS X Yosemite beta builds, members of the program got the same builds as well. According to reports Apple might launch a similar program for iOS this year.
At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference Apple will be expected to unveil iOS 9, the next iteration of its mobile platform. So far such a public beta program has not been initialized for iOS but that could change soon.
Apple is reportedly going to open up an iOS 9 public beta program once this software is unveiled at WWDC 2015 this June. The simple idea behind this exercise will be to get feedback on the pre-release builds from as many people as possible.
This will allow Apple to finetune the software so that it provides all users with a much more polished experience when iOS 9 will be publicly released in the fall of 2015.
Apparently public beta members for iOS will be capped at 100,000, significantly lower than the number of people that were allowed to test OS X Yosemite, but who knows when Apple might change its mind about this number.