Now that Apple’s Dev Center is live again after an eight-day outage, the company is getting ready to release the fourth iOS 7 Beta later today, if prominent bloggers and Twitter are to be believed.
In fact, a bunch of inactive download links for iOS 7 Beta 4 seem to be already up ahead of the official release on the Dev Center.
And if you ask BGR, Apple will release just three more betas for developers before the Gold Master version is ready for prime time in early September…
Jonathan S. Geller who runs BGR heard from multiple sources that Apple is planning to release iOS 7 Beta 4 today at around 1pm EDT / 10am PDT, over the air and through Dev Center.
For what it’s worth, BGR recently nailed the iOS 7 Beta 3 release date. The upcoming build for an AT&T iPhone 5 should be hosted here (the Verizon download is here).
More purported download links can be found in this MacRumors forum post.
The well-informed Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac says the purported build number of iOS 7 Beta 4 is ’11a4435d’, adding:
I heard last week that Apple is nearing an initial “GM1″ candidate internally. This candidate is said to be at a zero-priority-1 bug status, which means that there are no critical bugs left in the operating system.
Of course, Apple will likely discover more bugs in its testing, and will likely have several internal GM candidates before releasing the final GM seed to developers later in the year.
BGR was told that the fourth beta should contain “more bug fixes, graphics and UI enhancements and a couple of other updates”.
Some non-developers who installed iOS 7 Betas took to Twitter to complain about the operating system’s sluggishness and a huge hit on battery, not realizing beta code is normally optimized for battery and graphics performance either in a Gold Master candidate or the beta preceding it.
With that in mind, we’re expecting the fifth or sixth beta to be optimized for battery-friendly, jerk-free performance.