When Apple's Betas Arrive — 2015 to 2025

The Pattern Is Remarkably Stable

Every one of the 45 cycles recorded here opened its developer beta in June — on WWDC keynote day, within hours of the announcement. The earliest was iOS 13 on June 3, 2019; the latest was iOS 14 on June 22, 2020. Across 11 years the entire range is 19 days wide.

The public beta follows, and this is where the useful gap sits. 40 of these cycles ran a public beta. For the 19 where we hold an exact date on both, it opened an average of 32 days after the developer beta, ranging from 17 to 37 — so between two and five weeks, and closer to five in recent years. That lag is not a queue; it is the point. The builds carrying the worst regressions have already been found and replaced by the time the public channel sees anything, which is why the public beta is the right choice for a device you depend on.

Not every platform has always run a public beta. Apple opened the programme to iOS with iOS 9 in 2015 — the first time ordinary users could run Apple pre-release software at all — and added the Apple Watch much later, with watchOS 8 in 2021. Rows marked "not run" are cycles where a public channel did not exist for that platform, not cycles where we are missing the date.

Developer and Public Beta Dates by Year

Developer beta dates are exact. Public beta dates are recorded to the month, because that is the precision Apple announced them with at the time — we would rather give you the month than a specific day we cannot stand behind.

Using This to Predict the Next One

If you want to know roughly when next year's beta opens, this record answers it better than any rumour: the first full week of June for the developer channel, early July for the public one, and a finished release in September alongside the new iPhones. Apple has not deviated meaningfully from that shape in over a decade.

Within a cycle, the rhythm is a different question, and the interval between individual builds is the thing that actually signals where a release is heading. Our build history records every build with its date and the gap before it — a build arriving inside a week usually means a fix that could not wait, while a gap past three weeks generally means the cycle is consolidating ahead of a release candidate.

For the shape of the whole year in prose rather than dates, our guide to the beta cycle walks through each stage and what changes at it. If you are deciding whether to join at all, the release candidate is the lowest-risk entry point in the calendar.