Remember Apple’s public beta program for OS X Yosemite? By all accounts, it was quite successful, providing many Mac users who aren’t developers with the opportunity to try out the latest desktop operating system and also increasing the size of the pool of testers. 9to5Mac is reporting that Apple’s considering a similar public test of the upcoming iOS 8.3 beta (due in another month or so) and iOS 9, which will presumably arrive later this year.
Our take on the news: This is, of course, all rumor at this time — it’s coming from 9to5Mac, after all — but it makes sense that Apple would want to make beta versions of iOS available to a wider variety of users and devices in order to improve the quality of the final product. While others might disagree, I feel that OS X Yosemite has been very stable and that the large public beta was probably a contributing factor.