After years of countless web apps and services hopping on the bandwagon of the perpetual beta, the potency of the term has become diluted. Users don't think of betas as experimental builds of software for testing purposes; they think of Gmail, which only shed its beta status as a formality two years ago with 150 million users.

Give them any path, even a tricky or expensive one, to obtain a beta of a sexy new mobile operating system and they will, expecting it to work as well as the other "betas" they've used online.