The iOS 18 developer beta is now available, and while you have plenty of reasons to avoid it, the early-release software offers plenty of good stuff that you might as well enjoy right now. From the new Home screen tweaks to the sleek new Control Center, there’s enough to make even the most self-controlled iOS user a little curious about what’s going on in the beta—even if we know that a more stable public beta is coming relatively soon.
Remember that this is a developer beta and neither CNET nor Apple recommend installing it on your primary device for daily use. When you install beta software, you can expect to experience errors, and some may be so bad that you will want (or need) to revert to the previous version of the operating system.
This is what I tried to do, but the process had an unexpected and frustrating side effect. I’ll explain it to you and I hope you can learn from my warning.
If you’re looking to roll back to iOS 17, here’s a nifty guide to do so. And if you travel this summer, don’t miss these two tricks to save your iPhone’s battery.
The betas are going to be beta
I didn’t hesitate to install iOS 18 Developer Beta on my iPhone 14 Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 9, and iPad Mini, and each one has been a different experience. While I admit that I have used my iPad much less than my iPhone and Apple Watch, it has been the most stable.
But 10 days after installing the beta, my iPhone finally had enough and started acting up to the point where I needed to roll back to iOS 17. This came as no surprise to me — I knew what I was getting into. (As a long-time Android user, I’m more than familiar with the instability when running pre-release Pixel builds.) That said, I wasn’t expecting the side effects that rolling back my iPhone would bring.
A frustrating limitation that perhaps should have been expected
If your Apple Watch is running WatchOS 11 and you roll back your iPhone to the latest stable version of iOS 17, you’ll receive this error when trying to re-pair your watch.
Blake Stimac / Apple
It turns out that if you install WatchOS 11 beta on your Apple Watch and so If you roll your iPhone back to iOS 17, your watch won’t pair. At least, that’s what happened to me. The watch pairing seemed to start as planned for the most part, but it never completed the task successfully. It threw an error saying I needed to update my iPhone to pair the watch.
My first thought was to roll back my Apple Watch to WatchOS 10 and wait for the beta versions to become a bit more stable, but there’s one major problem with that. Searching the internet to see how to roll back your Apple Watch’s software ended with the same conclusion: you can’t roll back an Apple Watch’s software on your own. Instead, you have to send it to Apple to perform the downgrade. That’s a huge pain.
After watching a few more videos that ended up leaving me feeling more frustrated than when I started, I had to update my iPhone again to iOS 18 Developer Build to pair the watch again. That, thankfully, went well and I went back to the beta build on my iPhone and was stuck with WatchOS 11, which had only been fiddly at first and was otherwise pretty solid.
Lesson learned. If you update your iPhone to iOS 18 and your Apple Watch to WatchOS 11, you’ll be tied to those beta versions with no easy way out of either. A definitely odd quirk that made for a less-than-stellar Apple experience that I was in no rush to revive. But then iOS 18 Beta 2 and WatchOS Beta 2 were released and, well, I couldn’t help but be curious to see if this was somehow fixed, hopefully not resulting in the above error I received.
Unfortunately, and not too surprisingly, the same error is being thrown around on WatchOS 11 Beta 2. It remains to be seen whether the OS requirement will still be in place when the official non-beta builds are released. At least for now, it seems you’re out of luck if you want to revert back to iOS 17 and use your Apple Watch on WatchOS 11.
For more from Apple, check out the new features for iOS 18 RCS support and how Apple barely mentioned RCS support at WWDC.
