Apple Seeds Fourth Beta of iOS 10.3 to Developers and Public Beta Testers

Monday February 27, 2017 10:02 am PST by Juli Clover

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

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

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.

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app open/close animation, an Apple ID profile in Settings, a better breakdown of iCloud storage usage, warnings about outdated apps that won't work with future versions of iOS, HomeKit support for programmable light switches, improvements to SiriKit (bill paying, bill status, and scheduling future rides), CarPlay interface improvements, iCloud analytics options, 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.

Update: Apple has now seeded the fourth iOS 10.3 beta to public testers as well.

Top Rated Comments

AppleFan91

53 months ago

bring back the old whale emoji in one of these releases pls.

This....can't be a thing
[doublepost=1488218829][/doublepost]

Cool....release the final version already

Be honest, you'd be one of the first to complain if they did and it had bugs.

Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)

abluewhale

53 months ago

bring back the old whale emoji in one of these releases pls.

Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Am3r1ca16

53 months ago

There's a tremendous amount of ugly wallpapers right now and I have friends, so many friends calling me and telling me how they miss these old wallpapers. I don't know if most people don't care, but that is what they are telling me so it'd be very, very not bad if they came back. Believe me.

Don't you hate it when your friends call you to rant about ugly wallpaper in iOS 10. I know me too :rolleyes:

Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)

MrGimper

53 months ago

What would be good is if on the iPhone 7/7 plus, it detected you'd held the power and volume down buttons for a restart and didn't reduce your volume as you pressed the buttons together.

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

DonniRJ

53 months ago

In my 6s plus, beta 3 was eating my battery more than usual, can never last me a day, and the standby with the usage is always equal which is very weird, I don't even use the phone :( hopefully this beta 4 is any better for the battery :)

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

dannyyankou

53 months ago

bring back the old iOS 8 and 9 beta wallpapers in one of these releases pls.

Pretty much every wallpaper Apple has ever had is archived on the internet. Just Google "HQ iOS 9 stock wallpapers"

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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