Beta Profiles by Version — Every Apple Release

What Happened to Beta Profiles

For roughly a decade, getting an Apple beta meant downloading a configuration profile — a small .mobileconfig file you installed under Settings before restarting the device. Once it was in place, the beta showed up in Software Update like any ordinary release. Every version page below from that era describes a real file that really existed.

Apple removed the mechanism in iOS 16.4. Beta access moved to your Apple Account: you enrol once at beta.apple.com or developer.apple.com, then pick the channel under Settings → General → Software Update → Beta Updates. From iOS 17 onwards there was never a profile to download, and from that same cycle the developer beta stopped costing anything — the $99 developer programme is now only needed to ship apps, not to test them.

That history is why searches for a "beta profile" still return so much noise. Sites that stopped updating in 2022 still advertise downloads, and files claiming to unlock unsupported devices were never real even in the profile era — a profile only ever revealed betas your hardware already qualified for. Each page below states plainly which side of the 2023 line its version falls on, how that beta was actually installed, which devices ran it and what to install today instead.