PSA: You Cannot Install iOS 13 or iPadOS 13 Beta Using the Config File Trick

Posted by Rajesh Pandey on Jun 03, 2019 in iOS 13, iPadOS

Looking to install the iOS 13 beta 1 on your iPhone? Or the new iPadOS 13 beta on your iPad Pro? Compared to the last few years, Apple has made this process a bit difficult. Up until last year, one could install a developer beta of iOS by simply downloading a configuration file and then downloading the OTA update that followed.

With iOS 13 beta though, that’s no longer applicable. This means if you wish to try iOS 13 beta on your iPhone, you will have to connect it to your Mac and then use iTunes to install the beta. That’s more tedious than the older method which only required a few taps and did not involve using a PC. This also means that one has to download the heavy IPSW file for their iPhone which for iOS 13 weighs around 3-5GB on average.

Worse, installing iOS 13 beta 1 or iPadOS 13 beta on an iPad requires one to ensure that their Mac is already running macOS 10.15 beta or it has Xcode 11 beta installed. That’s easily another 7-8GB that needs to be downloaded. If you are on a slow or metered broadband connection, this should pretty much kill all your excitement about installing iOS 13/iPadOS 13 beta on your iPhone/iPad.

Apple has definitely made it harder than the last year to install the iOS 13 developer beta on your iPhone. If you don’t want to jump through so many hoops, you can wait for the public beta release which should be out later this month.

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