Understanding OS X Betas

With OS X Yosemite going public beta, I feel that it’s important that people understand what that entails. This happens almost every year but it seems worthy of a reminder.

Beta is the development phase where the product is not finished but ready to be tested. Operative term: NOT FINISHED. What does this mean to you?

There Will Be Bugs

Many apps will not work.

Things may be slow.

You may lose data.

Issues will be addressed on the developer’s schedule, not yours. Even until some time after Yosemite is released, apps may not be ready yet.

In short, if you use your machine for any type of important work, DO NOT INSTALL THE BETA. It’s not our, or Apple’s, fault or responsibility if you are unable to get anything done because you didn’t heed this advice. If you must install it, in the very least install it on another drive/partition or virtual machine (VMware, Parallels, etc.) so it doesn’t impact your main installation.

And remember the purpose of the beta is for the developer to test their product, not for you to get a sneak peek at what’s new. If you find a bug, report it to the developer. And I mean REPORT it. Do not instead:

Talk about the bug on some site that the developer will not see.

Review an app running on a beta OS or is in beta itself.

Tweet a complaint with few details (Twitter is horrible for bug reporting).

Stay quiet about it and assume the bug will be magically fixed.

If you really care about the bug getting fixed, then tell the developer directly, providing necessary details. If possible try and figure out if the bug is Apple’s or ours and email the appropriate party. In general, during the early beta stages, the bug is probably Apple’s. Near the end, it’s probably ours. We do want to fix things but not reporting them properly is counterproductive to that.

With everyone’s cooperation, hopefully the transition to Yosemite will be a smooth one. Ok, maybe not, but at least I tried.