We are only a few hours or days away from having among us the final and public version of iOS 16.5. Many thought that it was going to be the last update to iOS 16 before the arrival of the first betas of iOS 17. However, for a few weeks now we have been seeing how the Internet traffic of devices with iOS 16.6 is increasing. That means Apple is internally testing iOS 16.6 and will soon release the first beta for developers of this software that would foreseeably be the last before the first betas of iOS 17 that will be released from June 5, the date on which WWDC23 begins.
Apple is already internally testing the first beta of iOS 16.6
In the next few hours we will probably have the new iOS update among us: iOS 16.5. But this is not the issue that concerns us today, but the news around iOS 16.6. This version is not yet officially available for developers but we know for sure that Apple is testing it internally thanks to internal statistics that some american tech media have in their hands.
The forecasts are that the first betas of iOS 16.6 arrive at the end of this week or the beginning of the next. This would highly correlate with the timings Apple has always had with betas once updates are released globally. Nor would it be surprising if this beta arrived on the same day that iOS 16.5 was released, but we will not be able to know until that day.
What's new in iOS 16.6? We don't expect it to be a big update or the arrival of new features. On second thought: we are less than a month away from knowing the main news of iOS 17, so spending bullets on launching new features in software that is going to be "behind" is not worth it. However, with Apple we can never take it for granted and we will have to wait and see the release notes that will arrive soon to the developers.