Video

By Andrew O’Hara
Monday, May 07, 2018, 02:18 pm PT (05:18 pm ET)

Arriving just one week following the third beta of iOS 11.4, beta four has is now in the hands of developers. Included in this late-stage beta are some notable improvements to performance, as well as a regression to one of the additions we saw in beta three.

In the third beta, Siri could be used to control Apple Music playback on Apple TV, 3D Touch lag was abolished, and the volume icon in Control Center live-updated as the volume was adjusted.

It is this last point that seems to have taken a step backward in beta four. Now, when the volume is adjusted, the icon stays the same. A second or two after it stops being adjusted, the icon will update to reflect the output level.

You can see for yourself in our hands-on video.

The implementation in beta three seemed a much better user experience, but we will have to wait until public release to see if the change was purposeful, or a bug.

We also saw some nice performance gains in beta four. There was an average of a 50 point gain on the single core Geekbench test, and an almost 300 point increase on the multi-core.

iOS 11.4 will be the next major update to iOS 11 and will (presumably) finally see the release of AirPlay 2 and Messages in iCloud.

Alongside iOS 11.4 beta four, Apple also released the fourth betas of macOS 10.13.5, tvOS 11.4, and watchOS 4.3.1 on Monday.

Be sure to check out what was new in iOS 11.4 beta three.