14 DAY TRIAL // Apple released today a new beta of its upcoming watchOS 5 operating system for Apple Watch devices to application developers interested in testing their watchOS apps against the watchOS 5 release.
watchOS 5 beta 9 (build 16R5360a) is here just one day after Apple seeded the tenth beta of iOS 12 to registered developers, as well as the iOS 12 public beta 8 to the rest of the world. The new watchOS 5 beta is now available for installation via OTA (Over-the-Air) updates or by downloading the beta profile from the Apple Developer portal.
While macOS Mojave 10.14 and tvOS 12 still didn't receive a new beta version, watchOS application developers can now spend their weekend test driving the watchOS 5 beta 9 release on their Apple Watch devices enrolled in the Apple Developer beta program and dedicated to watchOS app development.
Of course, you'll need to have the latest iOS 12 beta 10 update installed on your iPhone device to be able to download and install the watchOS 5 beta 9 release on your Apple Watch, which needs to be connected to the charger during the entire installation process and charged over 50 percent.
What's new in watchOS 5 beta 9
Just like with the iOS 12 beta 10 and iOS 12 public beta 8 updates, the watchOS 5 beta 9 most probably addresses some minor bugs with the Apple Pay payment system to ensure all devices are eligible for the new donation program Apple will run from August 24 through 31 to support America's national parks.
For developers, watchOS 5 beta 9 restores the online form used by application developers to apply for distribution of apps using the com.apple.developer.health-movement-disorder entitlement, implements the ability to set the tintColor of WKInterfaceVolumeControl in WatchKit.
Apart from that, the watchOS 5 beta 9 update also updates the HTTP/2 implementation to support HTTP/2 connection re-use per RFC 7540 Section 9.1.1, which requires an HTTP/2 server to offer a certificate that includes more than one server hostname.
"The certificate may use the Subject Alternative Name extension or wild-carded domain names. In addition, NSURLSession requires name resolution to resolve the different hostnames to the same IP address. NSURLSession might re-use HTTP/2 connections across different domain names when these conditions are satisfied," reads the release notes.
