14 DAY TRIAL // Apple on Monday seeded the second beta of iOS 8.3 to registrants of its developer program, handing them a fresh build of the upcoming software update for iPhones and iPads worldwide.
Labeled as build 12F5037c, the beta is of course a free download for everyone with a paid membership to the iOS Developer Program. It supersedes the previous build, in that its focus areas remain intact.
Hundreds of new emojis
A change set to occur on the desktop as well as on mobile platforms, racially-diverse emojis, is one of the main new additions to the software, allowing customers to choose one of many skin tones when selecting a particular emoji.
The emoji keyboard not only gets hundreds of extra faces and symbols, it’s also scrollable now. As it stands (in iOS 8.1) emojis are divided by tabs found at the very bottom of the keyboard. In order to advance to a whole new set of characters - i.e. from faces to objects - one has to tap on a different tab.
Under iOS 8.3, this is a thing of the past. Advancing to a different type of character or symbol only involves scrolling left and right until you reach that particular section.
Other new stuff in iOS 8.3
Apple is working on several other things in this update. For example, when the first beta was released to developers, the company revealed that App Extensions would require an arm64 slice to run on 64-bit devices.
iOS 8.3 enables wireless CarPlay support, two-factor authentication for Google accounts, and more. Several known issues linger still; however, these seem far less abundant in the latest beta.
To download iOS 8.3 beta 2, visit the iOS Dev Center with your developer credentials in hand. Alongside the new beta, Apple also offers iOS SDK 8.3 (included in Xcode 6.3), which requires a Mac computer running OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
