Understanding : Beta’s, Release Candidates and Releases

At any one time there is a current version of the sim, and there may also be a newer current beta. A setting in the X-Plane Installer controls whether the updater will fetch a new beta or only a final release.

Alpha (Private)

An alpha is usually the first stage of merged version changes. We use these to assess the impact of changes, run early QA on them, and also test against private developers and private testers.

Beta (Public Beta)

A build is labeled beta if it is stable enough to run but still contains known bugs. Typically a beta will have a name like 12.5.0-b1 for version 12.5.0 Beta 1.

Release Candidate (Public Beta)

A build is labeled as a release candidate if it has no known major bugs. If the release candidate continues to appear bug free, it is declared “final” and becomes the release; otherwise we fix the bugs and release a new release candidate.

Release candidates have version numbers like 12.5.0-r1 for X-Plane 12.5.0 Release Candidate 1.

Release candidates are downloadable using the installer in “beta” mode until they are declared final; after that they are moved to the regular update process.

Release (Full Release)

When a release candidate is declared final, it is the final version – there will be no re-release of the release candidate. The “Release-Candidate” number will often stay the same, which confuses people. It simply means that “Release Candidate” was approved.

Should You Download Betas?

The short answer is: probably not. If you don’t already know the answer about whether you want betas, the best thing is to avoid them.

A beta is unfinished software; the purpose of the X-Plane public beta program is to allow us to find bugs that do not appear on our development computers, to test X-Plane on a very wide range of hardware, and to give third party developers and authors a chance to test compatibility and report bugs.

If you develop a 3rd party add-on for X-Plane, you definitely should participate in the beta program; it is much easier for us to fix 3rd party compatibility bugs if they are reported early in beta or even in alpha.

If you are simply a user, you may want to avoid betas, as they sometimes crash or have serious problems. We do not release betas with known crash bugs, but often serious bugs are specific to hardware we do not have.

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