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by Aurornis 330 days ago
> The first beta came out and it was _very hard_ to see the lock screen if you had notifications. How was that missed?

It’s a beta for a reason.

Past betas have also had graphical weirdness in certain new features, too. They iterate on it before release.

Why has everyone suddenly forgotten what beta means?

3 comments

I understand betas very well, but something as critical as that seems more fitting for an alpha. Liquid glass notifications on top of a bright wallpaper, bleeding together so you couldn't read or see anything shouldn't be in a beta.
The initial beta design had so many obvious issues that it's wild that it made it as far as it did. Hell, the readability of many UI elements was obviously terrible in the initial reveal, where you'd expect everything to be shown in the best possible light.

Obviously Apple can improve things for the final release (and it seems like they're taking some steps in that direction). But these issues should have been identified long before the beta was released, and the fact that they weren't does not inspire confidence.

The first beta often ships with core features missing or broken. It exists to get as many new features in front of third party developers as soon as possible, because Apple has very little time to accept feedback before they are locked in for shipping.

At the same time, there seems to be precious little time between when Apple decides a feature is going to ship in the next release, and when WWDC happens.

Even if there was common knowledge inside the company that a new UI was coming, it may have not been merged into mainline until closer to WWDC. At that point, individual teams will need to alter their code to build and be usable on top of the UI as part of continuing their own development - but were likely still focused on the death march for their own WWDC-launched features.

This isn't the first beta, though.
So are we not supposed to criticize a beta at all? How are they to know what to fix unless someone actually looks at it and makes clear what's wrong? Obviously they missed a pretty critical readability issue here.
You apparently have. Beta releases are supposed to be "we believe this to be ready to ship, but need to sort out bugs." What you describe has traditionally been alpha or even pre-alpha releases.