YouTuber Zollotech posts a community poll a few days after each iOS release, including betas. He asks "How's it been for you?". The options are: "great", "terrible", "okay but some bugs". Each poll gets well over 10,000 responses (some up to 22,000), so it's a big enough sample size to draw useful inferences.
He also includes options for people to indicate if they're using other OS versions, which complicates the interpretation of the results. For example, on the beta 3 poll, only 3% of respondents report their experience with beta 3 is "terrible," which sounds pretty good (except for this poor souls). But only 41% of the survey respondents are using 14 beta 3; the rest are using 13.6 or older--or Android. If you want to find out what percentage of the survey respondents actually using beta 3 consider it "terrible," you have to divide the 3% saying "terrible" by the 41% who constitute the portion of the sample that's using 14b3. 3/41 = 7.3% of people using 14b3 report "terrible." That's how I got the figures in the table below.
USER REVIEWS OF IOS14 BETAS
source: Zollotech community polls
*results for beta2 not available because Zollo's poll that week combined responses from people using beta 2 and 13.6GM. It's impossible to separate out the results for the two OS versions.
Beta 1 is the best of all the betas so far if we rank by lowest % terrible score. % terrible actually increases with betas 3 and 4, before coming down with 5 & 6 - though even beta 6 has more "terrible" responses than beta 1. Beta 4 is the worst by this measure - that's when I jumped in, and my experience was actually excellent - I see now that I was especially lucky.
Ranked by the % of respondents reporting a "great" experience, b1 again wins, slightly edging out b6.
It's interesting that beta 1 does so well. Possible explanations: 1) there are fewer people using beta 1 and they are more savvy (e.g., no public beta users like me). 2) there is more excitement for beta 1 of a major new iOS version than later betas 3) people expect more bugs in a beta 1 and are more forgiving of them. It's also possible that Apple's iOS 14 team really worked their butts off to make beta 1 especially solid.
He also includes options for people to indicate if they're using other OS versions, which complicates the interpretation of the results. For example, on the beta 3 poll, only 3% of respondents report their experience with beta 3 is "terrible," which sounds pretty good (except for this poor souls). But only 41% of the survey respondents are using 14 beta 3; the rest are using 13.6 or older--or Android. If you want to find out what percentage of the survey respondents actually using beta 3 consider it "terrible," you have to divide the 3% saying "terrible" by the 41% who constitute the portion of the sample that's using 14b3. 3/41 = 7.3% of people using 14b3 report "terrible." That's how I got the figures in the table below.
USER REVIEWS OF IOS14 BETAS
source: Zollotech community polls
| % great | % terrible | % okay but some bugs | |
| beta1 | 60.6 | 6.0 | 33.3 |
| beta2* | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| beta3 | 48.8 | 7.3 | 43.9 |
| beta4 | 40.5 | 11.9 | 47.6 |
| beta5 | 53.7 | 7.3 | 39.0 |
| beta6 | 60.0 | 8.0 | 32.0 |
*results for beta2 not available because Zollo's poll that week combined responses from people using beta 2 and 13.6GM. It's impossible to separate out the results for the two OS versions.
Beta 1 is the best of all the betas so far if we rank by lowest % terrible score. % terrible actually increases with betas 3 and 4, before coming down with 5 & 6 - though even beta 6 has more "terrible" responses than beta 1. Beta 4 is the worst by this measure - that's when I jumped in, and my experience was actually excellent - I see now that I was especially lucky.
Ranked by the % of respondents reporting a "great" experience, b1 again wins, slightly edging out b6.
It's interesting that beta 1 does so well. Possible explanations: 1) there are fewer people using beta 1 and they are more savvy (e.g., no public beta users like me). 2) there is more excitement for beta 1 of a major new iOS version than later betas 3) people expect more bugs in a beta 1 and are more forgiving of them. It's also possible that Apple's iOS 14 team really worked their butts off to make beta 1 especially solid.
