You Might Not Want To Install Apple's iOS 18 Developer Beta for iPhone Just Yet. Here's Why

Apple unveiled iOS 18 at WWDC 2024 today, bringing with it a slew of new features like a new Control Center, more home screen customizations and Apple Intelligence. As expected, a beta of the upcoming iOS 18 for iPhone release is now available to download. While the point is for developers to make sure their apps work with Apple’s latest software before iOS 18 hits every device, Apple doesn’t make it hard for most people to download and install.

Again, there’s an emphasis on the “developer” part of the developer beta here, as these releases are typically far from final release and aren’t intended — or really ready — for everyday iPhone users to start using all day, every day. This is especially true if the iPhone you’re installing the beta on is your personal iPhone rather than a separate or test device. So if you’re thinking of installing the iOS 18 Developer Beta, I’ll walk you through a handful of reasons why you might want to think twice and wait for the public beta in July.

For a deeper dive into Apple’s WWDC 2024 announcements, don’t miss the iOS 18 lock screen update and the new features in WatchOS 11.

With the iOS 18 developer beta, bugs are a part of the norm

Let’s fast forward to the end of this year. You’ve got a brand new iPhone 16 with iOS 18 on it. Everything looks and acts the way it should, and that’s because the new phone has the official release of iOS 18 on it. It can take while to get all of the bugs squashed out of new software before it’s ready for primetime, and from now until the final release, Apple will be updating the iOS 18 beta program incrementally to make it the solid experience you expect it to be. The developer preview you’re thinking of installing right now is not that.

Developer betas aren’t in final form and bugs and other irregularities are expected. Apple even breaks its iOS betas into both developer and public versions, with the latter being more usable for the curious iPhone user. If you want to install the iOS 18 Developer preview, here’s just a short list of issues you could potentially run into:

Certain apps may not work (bank, transit, etc.)
Shorter battery life and charging issues
Missing or undelivered notifications
Performance issues

Watch this: iOS 18 Brings New Tapback Features and Test Over Satellite

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If you install the iOS 18 developer beta, back up your iPhone first

It goes without saying that if the above issues that you may experience with the iOS 18 Developer Preview don’t deter you from installing it, just be sure to make a full device backup first. If you don’t, the only way to go back to iOS 17 is to restore your iPhone as a new device, which may result in the loss of data, settings, and other important information you might not be ken on to parting with.

It shouldn’t matter if you create a backup through iCloud or iTunes, but one thing to keep in mind is that previous versions of the developer betas sometimes had issues connecting to computers, so backing up through iCloud might be the safer option.

P.S., it only takes a couple of taps to back up your iPhone: