Except this is the developer beta, that was never meant for end users, only for developers. There will still be a public beta that will be free and open to all iPhone users that want to test it.
Public betas are usually only a day or two behind the developer beta. This just seems common sense; let developers test it for any major issues on a development device before letting Joe Sixpack install it on his daily driver.
A long, long time ago I recall it being tied to device UDIDs, then it moved to "whoever got their hands on the .mobileconfig leaked from the Apple dev portal". It was a race after WWDC announced the next iOS as to who'd have the .mobileconfig to share first.
Will they make a couple more $ out of this? Maybe.
I suspect they'd rather not have a proliferation of developers farming out their profiles and dealing with it on the service/support side. Developers with pseudo-ownership of strangers devices and users who don't fully understand what they are agreeing to with tying their device to a unknown developer can't be fun.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] thread> Until now, anyone could easily install iOS developer betas for free by downloading the profiles from websites such as BetaProfiles.dev.
For some reason, I'd previously assumed these profiles were tied to Apple IDs.
I suspect they'd rather not have a proliferation of developers farming out their profiles and dealing with it on the service/support side. Developers with pseudo-ownership of strangers devices and users who don't fully understand what they are agreeing to with tying their device to a unknown developer can't be fun.