Although Apple has been fairly guarded and secretive in the past, last year they offered a pubic beta of their latest operating system, OS X Yosemite. Now it looks like Apple might be expanding their beta program to iOS with the first public beta slated for March.
While developers have had access to beta versions of iOS for years, it looks like the general public could gain access to early builds of iOS in the coming months, with the first public beta of iOS potentially being released in March and made available via Apple"s AppleSeed program. The beta release will coincide with the developer beta and should be iOS version 8.3.
Naturally, this will be an excellent way for Apple to iron out any bugs that may be present in any upcoming builds of iOS. Also the public beta distribution will become even more exciting when Apple starts seeding its next version of iOS, iOS 9. iOS 9 is expected to make an appearance sometime in Spring at Apple"s annual WWDC.
Source: 9to5Mac