How to Get Early Access to IOS 14.5 Before Next Week’s Release
iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5 will officially hit iPhones and iPads next week, but you don’t have to wait until then to get your hands on the final candidates for new operating systems.
While it’s always possible for Apple to make some kind of fixes or tweaks to the public version of iOS or iPadOS, the release candidate is usually the final version of the operating system that everyone will have access to on launch day. In other words, you don’t run the risk of installing a buggy operating system on your iPhone if you decide to install the candidate version today, before most iPhone and iPad owners get it.
However, before pulling the trigger, you should still set aside a few minutes to make sure you’ve backed up your device to iCloud, a connected desktop or laptop. This is for CYA in case something goes wrong with an update on your device, or if one of your mission-critical apps has problems with iOS 14.5. These circumstances are more likely during a future transition between iOS 14 and iOS 15, but it never hurts to be careful.
When you are ready, all you have to do is register your device in the public beta of iOS or beta version for developers . Either it is working at the time of this writing; I used the latter and the other day got an update notification to iOS 14.5 candidate release.
As a reminder, you sign up for any of the beta releases by downloading the profile to your device (which means you will need to use Safari to access any site). Then you run the Settings> General> Profile app and install it, reset your phone, and then update the software following your normal steps . Once you have iOS 14.5 installed on your device, you can go back to the same screen and delete the profile to opt out of any future beta updates (unless you want to live on the wild side).
We’ll have a complete guide to iOS 14.5 next week, but if you can’t wait to try out some of its new features, here’s what we’ve already covered: