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After reading a post on Cult of Mac about the "9 Things Apple Needs to Fix in iOS 5 Before Launch" I got a little peeved as a developer.

Here are my "3 reasons why I hate hearing about non-developers installing iOS 5"

1. It's not done yet

There are going to be rough edges, bugs, sluggishness and I would expect that from any iOS beta that comes from Apple. They leave a lot of extra logging in and a lot of optimizations out. Stop complaining that some things do not work. It's called a beta for a reason.

2. You're advised AGAINST installing this on your main device

... and I bet every single one of you followed that recommendation too. (e_e) Take it from someone that didn't follow this advice before: This is great advice. Apple knows the beta isn't perfect. Other apps you have installed may not work, your battery life will suffer, strange shit can happen. They want everyone to experience their products at their best. Not at their worst just to access a new feature before their friends.

3. You're going to be screwed once beta 1 expires

You can't keep beta 1 on your device forever. At some unknown date your phone is going to be a brick that can only place emergency calls. I have some bad news for you. Apple is going to fix the beta for everyone workaround and the only option will be to restore back to 4.3. Once iTunes asks if you want to restore a backup of your phone it's going to complain. Backups can never be restored on to an older version of iOS. Any messages, application data, whatever that you collected over that time frame are gone. If you don't have a backup from before the beta you will have to start from scratch.

The exception

There is only one reason I like seeing people do this. The Windows users in Apple's developer forums complaining that they can't get shit working. They paid the $99 fee to get in to the dev program, own 0 Macs, and once they start running in to problems it's obvious what happened. Those posts make me laugh and laugh and laugh!

The short version: Let developers play with iOS 5 and deal with buggy betas. They are under an NDA and will gripe about it in the dev forums and bug reports as they should. If anyone asks if any beta of iOS is ready to be installed on their device... they obviously are not ready.

PS: This is coming from a person who signed up as a dev to get copy/paste in iOS 3... but I'm making apps now so it's cool ;)