A First Look at iOS 14 Beta: A Mixed Bag

I've been testing the latest beta version of iOS 14 on my iPhone 7, and I'm excited to share my experience with you. The first beta is already showing great promise, but there are some quirks that need to be ironed out.

One thing that's impressed me about this release is its stability. Running it on an iPhone 10 has been a breeze, with only a few minor bugs and app issues to deal with. I've had no major problems with the mail app, which was one of my biggest concerns going into the beta period. The new design seems sleek and modern, but I did notice that it's lost some of the functionality that made the previous version so user-friendly.

One feature that's been particularly useful is the ability to select multiple messages at once. This has saved me a ton of time when responding to emails, as I can quickly scroll down the list and select all the relevant messages with just a few taps. However, this feature also seems to be one of the battery-draining culprits in this version of iOS.

Speaking of battery life, I've noticed that it's not quite as long-lasting as it was on my previous operating system. In fact, I'm getting about 1.5 hours less screen time than I used to, which is a bit disappointing. My iPhone 7 is still running well, but I'm hoping that future updates will address this issue.

On the other hand, my iPad Pro 11 has been performing flawlessly, despite some occasional graphical lags and slowdowns when using certain apps. The Scribble mode on the keyboard seems to be a bit finicky at times, but overall it's been a great experience.

One thing that's stood out to me about this release is its performance. Whether I'm scrolling through my home screen or switching between apps, everything feels fast and responsive. This is especially notable on my iPhone 6s Plus, which has been running the beta with no issues whatsoever.

Of course, there are always going to be some bugs and quirks when testing a new operating system, but overall I've been impressed with iOS 14 Beta. As an early adopter, it's clear that this release is still in its infancy, and Apple will likely address many of these issues in future updates.

As a developer, you can already try out the beta version if you're feeling adventurous. However, I would caution against installing it on your main device – wait until the public beta comes out, which is usually more stable and trustworthy. This release has some notable features and improvements, but it's still not perfect.

If you're interested in checking out the latest iOS 14 Beta wallpaper, I've included a link to it in the description below. As always, if you enjoyed this video, be sure to like and subscribe for more content. And if you haven't subscribed already, please do so – it means the world to me!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone Aaron here for ZolloTech &iOS 14 beta one has been out for almosta week at this point and I've been usingit primarily on my iPhone 11 pro maxlike normal also my 12.9inch iPad pro from 2020 and the iPhone10 R so these devices have all beenrunning pretty well and a lot of youhave been asking me how can I get thebeta on my phone and currently you needto be a developer in order to get thebeta there are other ways to get it butif you're not sure what you're gettinginto I would really suggest waiting forthe public beta to come out then it'susually a little bit more stable andyou're able to use it on that without aproblem by going to apple.com slash betaand it's pretty simple to install thatway however if you're in the beta andyou want to go back to iOS 13.5.1or iOS 13.6 when it comes out youwon't be able to do that unless you usea computer so just keep in mind thisreally isn't for everyone it's for earlybeta testers and it will come out topublic beta testers probably in a fewweeks usually sometime in mid-july andthen also the final release will comeout in the fall usually around lateSeptember maybe October this year nowthere's a few new features I wanted togo over we'll talk about when iOS 14beta 2 should come out and when iOS 13.6should come out but the firstthing is a couple new features and oneof them is low power mode for an iPadand I showed this a little bit inshortcuts it's there but you canactually ask Siri to actually turn onthe power mode so I'll activate Siriturn on low power mode and it says lowpower mode is there even though there'snot a setting for it so you can turn itback off turn it on it's on the iPad somaybe they'll have some other batteryhealth features in future betas butright now if they're not there now alsoone thing that I didn't cover in myvideo about this was they've removed thewheel to input different things such asalarms so instead of having a wheelwhere you scroll through which Iactually prefer you now have a numberpad some people like this better somepeople like the wheel this could changecloser to the time it releases but rightnow if you want to put in an alarm youcould do 8 o'clock in the morning andset it up that wayno more scrollwheel to get through thatinformation now a small change thatpeople have recognized in iOS 14 beta 1that I didn't cover in the video aboutiOS 14 is that you can zoom in a littlebit further on photos so if you go intoa photo maybe we'll pick this one of thenew icons and then we'll zoom in toquick time can zoom in a little bitfurther than you could before or maybewhat the new Final Cut Pro icon willlook like this is what they showed atleast in the keynote so you can zoom ina little bit further than you couldbefore so we have that ability now itmay be helpful if you have some largerpictures or some fine editing you wantto do and things like that now Apple hasalso updated the field test mode thisallows you to see the signals of whatyour phone is doing as far as transmitsand receive you just go into your phonedialer and you'll see this is what itlooks like they've changed the way itlooks so you can see here's my transmitpower for my cell phone signal and thisjust lets you see a little bit moreinformation about that this is more forif you're trying to see what the signalis actually doing so they've updated theway that looks now before I talk aboutsome of the bad experiences I've hadwith iOS 14 beta 1 let me talk aboutsome of the good things and the firstthing is performance actually is quitegood scrolling is nice and smooth mostof the time you'll see here's my applibrary my list views and everything isnice and smooth most of the time I'm notsure why I picked that picture but it'swhat it these all are set to do whatthey want and change throughout the dayso my photos will change these apps willchange and it's nice to have that optionusing the operating system in generalhas been really good with the exceptionof the problems I'll mention in a momentbut speed has been good I'll talk aboutbattery in a moment but first let's talkabout some issues I've been having andsome of those are touch not workingproperly so sometimes I'll go to scrollsometimes it seems to be more in appsthan in the operating system itself butI'll go to scroll and my touch inputwon't work I've had that a few differenttimes I've had Twitter be slow or freezeand not respond at all especially thekeyboard so if I wanted to send a newtweet I could say this is a new tweetand I won't send this but you get theidea it seems to be ok nowsometimes it's super slow and buggy somost of the time it's working fine butsometimes it's really slow and it hasoccasional freezes I've had a few appscrash such as music fan music crash afew different times just listening to itit'll crash if I add something nextstuff like that and it's been okay it'smuch better than other early betas likeI said I've had a couple Reese bringswhen trying to set wallpaperso I'll set a new wallpaper like the onehere and the whole thing will respringand then I've had some widgets thatwon't refresh properly so maybe theweather isn't refreshing properly thanit will and that's fine it's early onlike I said and then finally I have thestorage bug that many of you have beenseeing so if I go to general I go to myiPhone storage you'll see it's using 247point 5 gigabytes of 256 gigabytes thesystem is using all of that storage nowI expect Apple to fix this with updatesso that doesn't concern me if I neededthe storage I could reboot the phone andreinstall everything and just start overbut right now the storage is taking upor the system is taking up almost all ofmy storage now with old devices peopleare saying that the battery life is okagain basically the same as all theother devices but they are sayingperformance is good and things are a bitbuggy from time to time with iPad OSI've actually had a pretty goodexperience and in general it's quitegood I haven't really had too manyissues with iPad OS seems to be workingfine I have had a few issues movingicons around but other than that nothingserious but I have had to reboot myiPhone a couple times when it wasn'tworking properly I just did a hardreboot and it went back to normal thesame is true on the iPad so you willhave some bug's now like I said it'sbeen pretty good for me overall thoughand those are a few bugs that I've hadthat's pretty typical of an early betain fact iOS 13 beta 1 and 2 were sounusable that I actually went back toiOS 12 I haven't had to do that yet withthis beta so that's a really great signit's working great now as far as batterylife this is really hit or missdepending on who you askbased off the YouTube community pollI'll talk about in just a moment it'svery hit-or-miss but let me show you mybattery life firstand then I'll talk about your batterylife based on that poll so if we go tobattery life you'll see my health isstill at 97% it's pretty typical theupdate will not make it go downhowever iOS 14 may be measuring itdifferently or more accurately as somepeople have seen this number fluctuatecompared to what they had on iOS 13 nowyou'll see though over the last ten daysmy battery life has been not greatyou'll see here two hours and 19 minutesof screen on time four hours and 41minutes of screen off time and I'm usingalmost 50% of my battery that means I'mgetting four to five hours of screen ontime and maybe eight hours of screen offtime before I was getting 10 to 12 nowthis is not everyone's experiences I'veseen other people tweet about this butsome people have had a really greatbattery life other people have hadhorrible battery life this isn't a bigdeal to me though because I think thisnumber is wrong because even thoughright now you'll see it says I've usedit two hours and 34 minutes and it'ssaying that I have I've used it almost50% but I've only used it 18%so if you look at the actual batterypercentage instead of the actual batteryusage stats I think you'll find that youhave much better battery than you expectinstead of looking at these statsthere's something off here again it's anearly beta and if you're having a ton ofissues make sure you report it in thefeedback app because Apple will use thatinformation now based off the YouTubecommunity poll 24 of you said that yourbattery life was good and 43 of you saidit was worse than beforeso that means worse than iOS 13.6or iOS 13.5.1 so just keepthat in mind it's an early beta I expectthis with that but just keep in mindthat it's not going to be great and allof the issues mentioned you can see hereon the left as well as all of thedifferent devices that you're using arelisted here as well so thanks toeveryone that that mentioned that in thepoll let's go ahead and take a look atthe youtube community poll now 9.3 kpeople voted or over 9000 300 people soI really appreciate it you'll see 20% ofyou said that it's great 2% say it'sterrible11% say it's okay but has some bugs soonly 13% or so are having issues with itand 52% of you are on I13.6 beta-2 are older and 15% are usingandroid so this numbers actually gonedown this week based on what we've hadin the past now I took all of thatinformation that you've commented aboutin the poll put it together give youwhat you eat we had a little bit earlieras far as what issues you were havingand then I'm having and about batterybut let's take a look at some of thesecomments we'll go through about ten ofthem or so now the first one says onewill iPhone ten target iOS 14 it willget it the same day as everyone elsearound the world when Apple releases itin the United States it's releasedeverywhere around the world at the exactsame time but keep in mind this is abeta so you won't see the final versionuntil September or October like I saidearlier it has been working great theonly problem is that Pokemon go does notwork so I'm in expecting an update soonyou shouldn't expect an update fromPokemon until the fall they don'tactually accept apps for updates thewith the latest OS until then so theymay update Pokemon but don't count onthat you may need to downgrade yourphone in order for that to work properlyit's stable fluid on my iPhone 11 Promaxbattery is good as well i'm on iphone 6smy widgets won't load up and my phoneshuts off randomly and battery drainsfast really amazed by the stability ifyou're using it with a normal usesurfing emails and calls some tweaksneed to be done but overall it's reallygood very very polished and optimizedfor a first beta the iOS 14 beta 1 fileis humongous and took up an additional12 gigabytes of storage which over timeslowly reduced to 5 gigabytes in theother storage space battery drainsrather quickly especially compared to13.5 and 6but still ask me a full day notice thatthe interface and all the animations aremuch more smooth especially whennotification drops down a very subtleand i pleasing animation widgets runperfectly except for the fact that ittakes time to update and startupespecially after restarting the deviceone of the most stable betas ever iOS 14is a great OS as well however batterydrains faster compared to iOS 13.6getting about 1.5 hours less screen ontimeiPhone 7 I'm amazed at how great thefirst beta is I look forward to itgetting better over time I'mrunning on the 11pro Max and the iPadpro 11 I'm on the iPhone 8 plus it'sbeen running great there is some bugs asexpected but it's probably been the moststable next generation of an iOS releaseI have ever tested I'm running it on aniPhone 10 are the mail app seems don'tgone backwards some I noticed my iconshows unread messages by opening the appand no unread messages previously under13.6 I could select all the messages inmail and then run my finger down theleft to select any number of consecutivemessages to take action and this is nowgone battery life is not as good and mycellular connectivity went from anaverage of minus 105 to more like minus111 and I think you're talking about theactual field test mode as far as yoursignal strength now as far as the mailapp I agree I noticed that was gone andjust forgot to mention it a little bitearlier but I think they may add itlater on or at least I hope they do Iuse that when you can select a bunch ofmail messages at once however mail hasbeen really stable for me I've had noissues with it so it's been great thistime so far Promax it's been great for afirst beta a few bugs and app issues butthat is expected there are a ton of bugsfor me but I am still enjoying the betait's been mostly nice there is no backtap on the iPhone 8 though and so far myAmazon music app doesn't want to workgreat iPad pro 2018 and Promax overall Ilove it soso battery occasionalgraphical lags on the iPad such as iconsreturning to the dock after going homekeyboard is laggy on both occasionallysometimes a struggle leaves scribblemode to get a keyboard to show nothingbothersome at all for a first beta on myiPhone 6s everything is fast I don'tknow what really fast is on a smartphone I'm an iOS 14 it's great noproblems I'll accept my work app doesn'twork any more the first iOS 14 beta ismuch better than the first iOS 13 betaless heating more performance iPhone 6splus here I'll read a couple more iOS 14beta 1 iPhone 11 when somebody callssometimes it pops up that there's takingup the whole screen and doesn't give methe option to decline it and a couple ofrespring z' great on my iphone 8 littleto no slowdowns there is a bug where Iwant to go into settings storagemessages then it crashes but beside thatthis release has beenreally stable for me and finally sogreat on my iPhone 10s far better thaniOS 13 beta 1 no Reese brings for me sofarpretty smooth a great update overall andlike I said for an early beta this hasbeen phenomenal compared to what we hadwith iOS 13 so hopefully we'll see it bemuch more stable over the coming monthsor weeks and I would expect iOS 14 betato not necessarily this coming week butthe week after now Apple could changethis up usually they take a couple weeksfor the first beta but it's hard to sayhowever iOS 13.6 I think willeither get a beta 3 or a public releasethis coming week in fact there's somefeatures with Apple car key that aresupposed to come out with iOS 13.6on July 1st so we may see a publicrelease on Monday or Tuesday before thenso that wouldn't surprise me at all so Ireally expect to see those things goingforward now as far as this update if youwant to try it out and you're adeveloper you probably already know howto do that if you're not a developer Ireally would not advise putting this onyour main device I would wait and put iton an older device or maybe just waituntil the public beta is out that'susually a little bit more stable andmore trustworthy this does have someissues and it's fine most of the timecompared to others but it's still not ahundred percent so just keep that inmind if you're going to try it outotherwise it's available for everyonethe same day everywhere now if you'dlike to get your hands on this wallpaperof course I'll link it in thedescription as I always do and if youhaven't subscribed already pleasesubscribe and if you enjoyed the videoplease give it a like as always thanksfor watching this is Aaron I'll see younext time\n"