Just as Nullriver promised, glimpses of the new Installer.app 4.0 have now been sighted in the form of a pre-release copy of the third-party applications installer for iPhone. The beta release of the new application applies some of the new changes the developer mentioned in a previous post a couple of weeks back.

Please note that Installer.app 4.0b2 is intended for developers to use at the moment, although you are free to take a look around and check out its current features. At the moment, several developers have already confirmed receiving their own pre-release copy of the app and are already implementing its new file structure into their own repositories.

To install the new pre-release copy of Installer.app, just follow these instructions after downloading the file found on the source link.

1. Upload the Installer.app to the iPhone via SSH to /Applications folder.
2. Set permissions to 777 on /Applications/Installer.app/Scythe (chmod -R 777 Â?/Applications/Installer.appÂ?)
3. Set permissions to a srx on /Applications/Installer.app/Installer (chmod a+srx Â?/Applications/Installer.app/InstallerÂ?)
4. Reboot your iPhone.

Coupled with the Cydia installer program and Apple's online App Store, this further diversifies the list of apps that can now be downloaded on the iPhone. Of course, we still have to wait for the official release version of Installer before we can try it out, but at least we know that work on it is steadily progressing.