iOS 16.3 Beta 1 is Here – What’s New? Let’s Find Out!

iOS 16.3 beta 1 was released to developers and iOS 16.3 public beta 1
should be out by the time this came in at a very large 5.33 gigabytes that’s on my iPhone 14 pro-Max and it’s usually large when you’re going from a public release that we were on with iOS 16.2 to a developer release so anytime you do that it reinstalls the OS and starts over again it doesn’t take up additional space it just overwrites everything and this was released alongside.

It’s Modern Updates

Now let’s go ahead and take a look at the build number and talk about what’s new so we’ll go to settings then we’ll go over to General then about and as you can see the build number is 20D 5024e this is the first build.

So we’re a few builds away from a final release and the early builds typically have some changes in them but the major changes usually come later but there are some new features to talk about the first thing is the overall modem you can see the new modem firmware of 1.40.00.

This modem firmware is new compared to iOS 16.2 public which was 1.22.02 hopefully that will help with some connectivity I’ve had some issues with Wi-Fi although that shouldn’t really apply but maybe it will help some.

New Features, Changes, and Updates

The First new feature is a pretty major one apple announced on their website that would be coming soon with future updates in 2023.

You can see those if we go to the Apple Newsroom and in the press release they talked about using security keys to log into your Apple ID account and that’s something they’ve added with this update so you can use a Fido security key or UB key and that can be found under settings tap your name and then go into password and security.

Security Keys

If we scroll down a little ways on password and security you’ll see the option for add security keys.

If we tap on this give it just a moment it pops up and tells us about this a Fido-certified security key is third-party Hardware that you can use to verify your identity when you sign in it says strongest account security and replaces Verification codes.

We can learn more or add a security key so we’ll go ahead and add one and it says you need two security keys so you’ll need two compatible keys and then we’ll go ahead and hit continue.

I’ll show you how this works with one key and you’ll need two to set it up but we’ll wait for it we’ll put in our iPhone passcode and now it says insert and activate your first security key if you have a compatible NFC key bring it near the top of this iPhone and I actually do have one of those.

I use with different account authentications it’s USBC if I bring it near the back here you’ll see that it’s adding it all by itself it added it and then I can name the key we’ll tap on next after we’ve named the and you’re good to go then anytime you key and then we can set it up then you do the same for the second key and you’re good to go then anytime you sign in with your Apple ID.

 It will now prompt you for the security key instead of a two-factor authentication code when it needs it so that’s great that they’ve added the security to iOS with the introduction of iOS 16.2 we got Apple music sing now the first time you open your Apple music app you’ll actually be greeted by a new splash screen that talks about it saying new in apple music belt it wrap it sing it sing along with real-time lyrics and control the vocals on millions of songs introducing Apple music sing and then it tells you you can find your song so they’re just bringing more awareness to Apple music sing and also under browse.

We have a ton of information about it as well as different playlists so that’s something that’s new that they’re just really promoting here so something a little bit more promoted in 16.3 than even 16 point two where they introduced it when you go to transfer music from your phone to your homepod.

You’ll now get this little pop-up screen and I’ve seen this twice now where it says transfer music and control homepod you can bring your iPhone into your homepod again later to view controls or transfer music.

We’ve had this feature with handoff for quite some time but now it’s just making us more aware as we bring it closer we’ll hit continue and then of course go back to our song and it’s just here so we can hit play or we can transfer it back from our homepod to our iPhone the next change has to do with Apple Maps.

It’s a small change but something they’ve updated and if you go to maybe a local restaurant you’ll see here that it will say rate this place we had the option to rate this before but now it’s popping up individually also it looks a little different when you go into Maps and search someplace you can see with iOS 16.2 on the left and iOS 16.3 beta 1 on the right.

Where it says rate this place they’ve changed the way it looks as far as it rating as and associated with your Apple ID they’ve made it look a little bit different and they’re just making some small visual changes within the code there’s an awful lot of changes to accessibility.

There’s a lot of code updates there and we saw before with earlier betas of iOS 16.2 with beta 2 that Apple was actually preparing to make a custom accessibility mode according to what was found in The Code by nine to five Mac and Mac Rumors.

So you’ll see here it says custom accessibility mode preferred layout and there’s a lot of underlying code that’s changed there so maybe we could see that in the future with larger icons for different touch targets making it easier to press we’re not seeing that yet but hopefully we’ll see that maybe with beta.

DownGrade

One thing I wanted to mention though is with iOS 15.7.2 a lot of people were asking can I downgrade from IOS 16.2 down to this version you could do that.

When it was in developer with the iOS 15.7.2 RC I did that on the iPhone 8 plus that I have here however apple is not making available the firmware files to downgrade using the latest updates with iOS 15.7.2 so they’ve only provided them for the iPhone 6s 6s plus to the iPhone 7 and 7 plus and SE.

However if you were on an iPhone 13, 13 Pro any of those devices but you hadn’t upgraded the iOS 16 yet you still could install 15.7.2 but they’re not making it easy to downgrade so it doesn’t look like it’s something you’ll be able to easily do maybe if you had the release candidate file.

You could try it but there’s not really a way to get that as Apple has pulled those from their developer website but I just wanted to mention that it’s just a security update otherwise.

Bug Fixes And Released Notes

As far as bug fixes Apple hasn’t mentioned anything specifically within the feedback app if we go into the latest release notes it says there are no new release notes for this beta software update so far.

We don’t know if they’ve updated anything at all as they haven’t said that they have other than what we found already so hopefully they’ve fixed some things I’ve had those swipe bugs swipe home bugs.

Where it would lag a lot with iOS 16.2 I’ve also experienced where Wi-Fi would just stop working so I’d be on YouTube in the YouTube app and it would say I had no internet connection even though Wi-Fi was there.

I’d have to turn it off and back on and then it would work it would work fine on cellular and the rest of my devices connected to Wi-Fi work just fine but for some reason on iOS 16.2 public release I was having those issues so hopefully they’ve resolved.

Youtube Bug

The YouTube bug with it rotating if we’re playing a video and I rotate to landscape you’ll see it still stutters a little bit all of my apps are up to date so hopefully they fix this with a future update it’s probably a huge tube update that needs to be fixed though additionally there’s no other bugs that I know have been fixed we won’t know for a few days if things are behaving a little bit better.

Storage

People continue to say storage is taking up a lot of space but it seems to be pretty normal for me and I’m hearing good things from other people saying that they’re not really seeing much of an issue as far as storage.

Overall that loaded super-fast that’s much faster than 16.2 and it’s just still loading system data which can take a minute so I’ll give it just a moment system data finished loading and it’s taking up 38.62 Gigabytes of system data.

That’s completely normal I have plenty of data free it’s using it as system cache and as long as I can install apps use my apps it’s not really a concern so unless you’re having an issue as far as not being able to install apps or use them because you’re running out of storage due to that I would really ignore it now as far as overall performance.

Performance

Performance so far is nice and fast but we know with iOS 16.2 that oftentimes it takes a few days for where we’re playing a song swipe home it goes into the dynamic Island and then it would start to stutter after a few days so it will take a few days to know that and of course I’ll have follow-up on the weekend as we’ll talk about if that’s occurring again how iOS 16.2 is for everyone.

Battery Health And It’s Performance

Overall battery life well that will take a few days to measure but we’ll go into battery health and charging and my phone is surprisingly down to 99 I’ve been charging it the exact same way.

I did with my 13 Pro Max and it took an entire year before it dropped so it’s even using the same charger to charging it in my car and if we go into settings on the 13 Pro Max you’ll see after a year it dropped to 98 we’re down to 99 already on the 14 pro Max that’s probably the first time.

I’ve seen that but I don’t really care too much about that I’ll use it for a year and if I need to replace the battery I’ll do that if we take a look at the overall battery life battery life hasn’t been great at 3 hours and 18 minutes of screen active time three hours and five minutes of screen idle time using about 70 percent of the battery hopefully this improves over the next few days.

What About Heating?

The overall heat of the phone it’s surprisingly cool despite installing 40 app updates having it.

So I’ll show you the thermal camera as I bring this over the hottest part of the phone I’m seeing about 86 to 87 degrees Fahrenheit so that’s not too bad overall it’s pretty good let’s switch to Celsius and in the same area with Celsius as I bring it over the hottest part of the phone we’re at about 31 degrees Celsius so 30.9 to 31 degrees Celsius now the phone seems even cooler now that I’ve picked it up after showing you the overall heat signature from the FLIR camera.

Should you install iOS 16.3 beta 1?

I would say because we won’t probably have beta 2 until after 2023 I would hold off unless you have a secondary device I don’t normally recommend an early beta on your main phone if you have an extra phone to test it on an iPad or anything else.

I would definitely try it out there but probably not on your main phone I’d see how iOS 16.2 is or check back for the follow-up this weekend.

Benchmarks

Overall benchmarks I did run those on this device just quickly and they were pretty good if we go to the CPU benchmarks here in the history.

I ran this today and scored 1860 56 for single core 5177 for multi-core that’s pretty good compared to the previous one and considering that it just rebooted and installed an entire OS so it’s still a little bit higher for single corn it’s a little bit lower for multi-core but doing well overall and so that’s everything with iOS 16.3 beta 1.

Of course if I find more features I’ll be sure to let you know about those in a different video and if you’ve found any more I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.