"public beta" means Users can use it, but should expect to get bugs as the code is not yet ready for general use.

It's a working process of companies to expose new functionality earlier, so that Users can try it out, feed back what they like/dislike and generally help to improve it, generally in ways that the developers may not have thought of.

A public beta also means you are going to have, hopefully, a lot of people looking at it and testing it, which should help get more intensive testing of features.

The key caveats of doing a public beta are:

It can damage your reputation if it's really poor quality code, or the users don't like what you're doing The testing will cover only the bits the public actually use, not the bits you want tested; bugs may remain unexposed - but this is true of most software engineering If there is personal data available - any sort - there can be legal risk to you and your customers