hunting down iOS betas

ever since tethered downgrades became feasible and somewhat usable on certain newer devices (namely A9 and A10-based devices), i've been curious about hunting down and running experimental and beta versions of iOS. my main testing device is a random iPhone SE 1st gen i have lying around.

prior to restoring anything, i had been running 19A5261w (iOS 15 beta 1) on it. i had upgraded to it back in june 2021 after the WWDC keynote of that year. since then, i had kept on that firmware because i was too lazy to update, then trollstore came out. like most beta iOS versions, they're pretty dry for jailbreaks. palera1n didn't work (though that may have just been an A9-related issue) and dopamine just didn't support it.

i kept on that version until may 2025. once i discovered new tools for tethered restores and SEP exploits, i finally decided to give it a go and restore, testing with a simple IPSW of iOS 9.3.1. as expected, ti worked. wifi connections worked, and i had no issues with anything. cellular didn't work, but i suspect that simply being a side effect of the iOS 15.8.4 baseband. that, or old age claimed the cellular antennas. regardless, it didn't matter to me, i have no plans to main an iPhone SE 1 in the godforsaken year 2025.

this led me down a bit of a journey. i wanted to find beta versions to try. i managed to track down iOS 11 beta 1, which ran just as well as you'd expect an early iOS 11 beta to run on a crappy A9 device. it was horribly bugged and almost everything was broken, but i expected no less from iOS 11.

apple has a habit of purging iOS betas from their servers. this contrasts with google, who for some ungodly reason, still serves the fastboot images for LPV79 on the nexus 5 from 2014. additionally, betas are locked behind apple developer accounts. while it's entirely free to get an account, it also means that finding archives of the firmware is basically a near-zero chance. google's search engine has sucked ass lately, and no other search engines i know of offer the in-depth advanced search tools google has.

so, at the current moment, i've only found iOS 11 beta 1. i plan to hunt for early iOS 13 betas eventually, but i doubt i'll find them. and no, for legal reasons, i'm not posting.or offering downloads for what i find. if i'm feeling generous, i might throw it on the internet archive, but don't count on that.