Apple Suddenly Releases New iOS 26 Public Beta For iPhone 11 Users
Apple’s latest software release left out three iPhones when it happened this week — and it took a day for this problem to be resolved. Here’s what happened.
Apple releases iOS 26 public beta for iPhone 11.
Apple released the first public beta version of iOS 26, the software which will go on general release in September on plenty of iPhones, including current models like the iPhone 16 Pro Max and this fall’s upcoming iPhone 17 series. The compatibility for the new software stretches all the way back to the iPhone 11, first released in late 2020. Or it should have done, but three phones were left out of the release: iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. This is the full list of compatible phones.
As spotted by MacRumors commenting on Friday, “Apple did not seed the iPhone 11 version of the iOS 26 public beta yesterday, but it’s out now. The update has a build number of 23A5297n, which is different from the 23A5297m public beta that other testers received,” it reported.
The build number is almost the same, suggesting there’s very little difference between the two, but whatever the changes, they’re there to suit the 2020 iPhones.
It seems there was an issue for those models in the beta, which has now been fixed.
“Fixed: On iPhone 11, if you have organized apps into folders on your Home Screen, you might only see the leftmost column of the grid of apps when opening a folder. The other two columns in the folder do not display the app icons, preventing users from launching those apps,” Apple said.
This is one of those small-but-highly-irritating problems, so Apple did the right thing, I’d suggest, to hold off releasing it. For this to be the blemish on iPhone 11 users’ first encounter with iOS 26 would have been a shame.
A new developer beta has also been released so that developers using iPhone 11 handsets can see the benefit, too.
Although the first public beta has seemed pretty solid, it’s a reminder that there can be issues, and that it’s worth not installing iOS 26 on your daily driver just yet, but rather put its all-new design, extra features and more to the test on a secondary device instead.