Don’t know who you are talking to @paaltio, but I disagree. I’ve had to do iOS dev against beta iOS and Xcode releases. Yes, there are issues, as there are with anything beta. By the time they drop a beta release, they don’t change a whole lot. It’s usually fielding and addressing radars around issues with the APIs as they are within that beta.
I have found that the iOS/OSX beta builds_are good indicators of what final builds will look like. I can’t think of a time I had to make any significant code changes to accommodate a GM build at the last minute, after having done dev against a beta, put it that way. I have had to wait for them to fix issues that affect my code, but if there is change in the API, there are typically options that allow me to stick with the code I have to some degree.
I would argue that It is healthy software development - when you are building against a platform that you_know is going to change significantly once a year - to proactively develop against the next release of the platform you are developing for. Not doing so leaves you with a pile of very upset long-standing, dedicated customers. If what you are saying is true, the iOS app store should be brought to its knees with broken apps every time they rolled out a new release.
The Apple media outlets had already put out the message that this was a fairly innocuous maintenance release, which is what prompted me to upgrade, at a time I usually don’t. I feel like the messaging from Steinberg was clear enough, pervasive enough and early enough to stop me. Not good business.
As for resources, it takes a Dev or QA person half a day to spin up a beta build, load an Application in development onto it with some array of known common setups, and start reporting the things that are going to be problematic, and another hour or two after that to upgrade and perform some cursory checks again. It doesn’t take a big Dev team to do that much, and they could have put the message out sooner based on findings at the minimum. That little bit of effort would have better informed my decision making, and kept me working.
cheers!