For many years in the games industry, I understood alpha to mean “feature complete” and beta to mean “content complete”. This is how we managed projects that involved hitting a GM date with a final disk to ship to retail for a specific marketing window. There was no ability to update the disk in those days and I think we got pretty good at hitting dates set 2 years in advance. We “finalled” in August to hit an October release.

The world is different today and the meaning of beta has been eroded so much it currently means “broken and unfinished” to many people. As a user, you should not expect anything from a beta. “It’s a beta,” is the refrain if you dare speak out. Well here I am to speak against this doctrine of user-hostility. A beta should be usable. Otherwise it is not testable. The whole point of a beta test is for users to give meaningful feedback. You don’t get feedback if you keep telling them that they shouldn’t expect it to work as advertised. That’s not what a beta is for for heaven’s sake. It is to find out if it does work as advertised outside of your developer labs.

Defending incomplete broken betas must stop. We must demand more and expect betas to be usable so we can test them properly. Apple released a fantastic new API at WWDC this year and produced a session on it which is now online. But the API was not available until 2 weeks after the session and subsequent API deprecations have already made some sessions out of date. That’s also after the end of WWDC and any possibilty of asking the engineers about the API in the labs.

This is not how it was intended, I’m 100% certain of that. The Apple engineers that sweated to make the dates, but sadly missed, must be at least as disappointed as me. But if we were stricter about our definition of beta this would not have been released like this and we’d all feel better about it when it hits beta in August instead.