Apple Seeds Third Beta of iOS 10.3 to Developers

Monday February 20, 2017 10:03 am PST by Juli Clover

Apple today seeded the third beta of an upcoming iOS 10.3 update to developers, two weeks after seeding the second beta of iOS 10.3 and more than a two months after the release of iOS 10.2, the last major update to the iOS 10 operating system.

Registered developers can download the third iOS 10.3 beta from the Apple Developer Center or over-the-air with the proper configuration profile installed.

ios-10-3-beta
iOS 10.3 is a major update, introducing several new features and changes to the iOS 10 operating system. The biggest new consumer-facing feature is "Find My AirPods," which is designed to help AirPods owners locate a lost earphone. Find My AirPods records the last known location of when an AirPod was connected to an iOS device via Bluetooth and can play a sound on a lost AirPod.

Apple's latest update also introduces a new Apple File System (APFS), installed when an iOS device is updated to iOS 10.3. APFS is optimized for flash/SSD storage and includes features like strong encryption.

Apple plans to introduce some App Store changes in iOS 10.3, allowing developers to respond to customer reviews for the first time. iOS users are also able to label reviews in the App Store as "Helpful" or "Not Helpful," which should help surface the most relevant review content.

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Apple also plans to limit the number of times developers can ask for a review, allow customers to leave app reviews without exiting an app, and provide a "master switch" that will let users turn off all app review request prompts (said to be included in beta 2).

Also new in iOS 10.3 is a redesigned app open/close animation, an Apple ID profile in Settings, a better breakdown of iCloud storage usage, improvements to SiriKit, and more. For a full rundown of the changes introduced in the first beta, make sure to check out our dedicated "What's New" post.

What's new in iOS 10.3 beta 3:

App Compatibility - In the Settings app, there's a new "App Compatibility" section that lists apps that may not work with a future version of iOS. Tapping on one of the apps opens it up in the App Store so you can see when it was last updated. As has been discovered in previous betas, opening one of these apps on your iOS device pops up a warning with a similar non-compatible statement. App Compatibility can be accessed by opening the Settings app and choosing General --> About. From there, scroll down to "Applications" and tap it.

Related Forum: iOS 10

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Top Rated Comments

Vashetti

125 months ago

haha yeah right, nothing has changed i bet

"I have no idea what I'm talking about."

Score: 31 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Macrule36

125 months ago

6s Plus was having major battery drain on first two betas. Hoping they got the kinks worked out.

Edit: Day 2 Update - Battery life isn't horrific today. Simply below par. Not sure what everyone else is seeing.

Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Zirel

125 months ago

I can't find anything in detail when I do a Google search looking for all of the benefits of APFS. Someone with some expertise on the matter care to enlighten me? I see strong encryption in the article, but are there any other big benefits? Is this comparable to FAT32 migrating to NTFS?

Yes.

Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)

MR-LIZARD

125 months ago

There is ZERO technical reason that Apple has to cut off 32-bit app support. Even Windows still supports 32-bit software! This is nothing more than a ploy by Apple to get people to upgrade their hardware.

I want Apple to cut the nonsense and let their customers continue to use "old" applications.

Zero technical reasons isn't strictly true. If they're having to maintain 32bit and 64bit APIs you're giving your development team additional coding work. You then need to test both 32/64 bit API's, plug security holes, etc. If you're supporting both you're doubling your workload.

Seeing as Apple released 64-bit processors on the 5S back in 2013 and has been asking developers to update their Apps ever since it's not a new idea. Perhaps the proportion of 32-bit Apps in the App Store that are being used is so low that it's disproportionate to the resources Apple needs to plough into 32-bit it to keep it running along.

Windows goes out of their way to support old or poorly programmed software to maintain the status quo. If you check out Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog you can see where MS bend over backwards to keep things ticking over.

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Vashetti

125 months ago

Any news on native dark mode??

Please be excited for iOS 11.

Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)

KALLT

125 months ago

I can't find anything in detail when I do a Google search looking for all of the benefits of APFS. Someone with some expertise on the matter care to enlighten me? I see strong encryption in the article, but are there any other big benefits?

On iOS, you will see more efficient space usage and quicker disk operations. Apple keeps the system and user data on separate partitions. APFS volumes can share disk space between them dynamically, allowing Apple to give back some of the reserved space on the system partition (by how much and whether Apple will do this is not entirely clear though). APFS also makes file copying more efficient by not actually duplicating the whole data directly (and using twice the space), but by duplicating pointers to the same blocks instead and by writing only the changes to disk when changes are made. Copies therefore won’t use more space unless they are changed, and copy actions happen instantly, because no data is copied at the time a copy is made. APFS also handles meta data a bit differently and can give much quicker and current insight into space usage.

APFS is just better adapted to the actual usage of the file system and refactors some of the technologies that Apple inelegantly added to HFS+ over the years. On iOS itself, you probably won’t see any other direct benefits.

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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Apple Seeds Third Beta of iOS 10.3 to Developers

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