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Apple's iOS 12.3 Public Beta 5 for iPhone Now Available

May 7, 2019 06:00 PM

May 7, 2019 08:59 PM

Eight days ago, Apple pushed out iOS 12.3 public beta 4 for anyone who wants to try it out. Now, there's a new version, iOS 12.3 public beta 5, released May 7, less than an hour after the developer software update. Just like it's developer version, the fifth iOS 12.3 beta for the public is a simple update with seemingly under-the-hood changes only.

If you're looking for new features, this isn't your update. Beta 5's release notes are identical to its predecessor, although that isn't the full story. We suspect that beta 5 likely includes bug fixes for issues found in beta 4 and earlier, as well as security patches for any vulnerabilities that might exist in those versions. It's not possible to say what those are, if any, but if you were on beta 4 and were having buggy issues, it's worth updating to beta 5 to see if it fixes them.

You can check out beta 5's release notes below for yourself, which Apple released earlier in the day. Again, these notes are identical to beta 4, so don't be surprised to see some repeats. We'll keep an eye out for any new unannounced feature you should know about.

General: Resolved Issues

Resolved an issue that prevented iOS 12.3 from being installed
on devices running previous iOS versions.
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Accessibility: Resolved Issues

The Accessibility Events switch was removed, because related
aspects of the W3C AOM effort are no longer applicable. (49784417)
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Date and Time: New Features

Support for the Reiwa (令和) era of the Japanese calendar, which
begins on May 1, 2019, is now available. The first year of
Japanese-calendar era is represented as  “元年” (“Gannen”)
instead of “1年”, except in the shorter numeric-style formats
which typically also use the narrow era name; for example:
“R1/05/01”. (27323929)
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Date and Time: Resolved Issues

Resolved an issue that caused unexpected behavior while changing
the system time ahead to May 1 when using a device with the
system language and calendar set to Japanese. (49371044)

To download and update your iPhone to iOS 12.3 public beta 5, you'll first need to be a public beta tester with a valid configuration profile. If you have iOS 12's "Automatic Updates" enabled, you can let the software update overnight. To install right away, head to Settings –> General –> Software Update –> Download and Install, then follow the prompts.