A clarification on the icon-shift-to the left issue. This was a GUI modification meant to give a clean, distinctly /e/ look to the UI. Gaël gave a detailed clarification in his post here.
Now to the important part about the changes getting pushed to the dev branch. This was a slip from the dev team. The fix was added on top of the tested build and released without much testing. Gaël had not approved this neither was this discussed in detail with others in the team. This was a genuine mistake and one that had a serious impact on a large number of users who got the build OTA and attempted to run it on their phones. Not only did the patch cause bootloops it made some users do a factory reset causing loss of their data.
Today we are going to discuss ways to prevent this in future. The no-patches-on-top of a tested build is definitely one of the rules we need to cast in stone. One option I suggested is to have a stable build for all devices. This would be a working build a few iterations older but stable and always available for download. At present we only have stable builds for the phones users purchase from the eShop. These are builds tried and tested in the dev channel.
Also always informing users in advance of major changes and discussing on the forum would be discussed. Most of these are basic requirements in a build release process but in light of these development now they need to be strictly enforced.
Will update on the outcome of this discussion .