Found the reason and the solution
Hi,
it seems nobody has a clue of what is going on so I spent some time and I've found both the reason and the solution to this problem.
In my case the Installer was failing to start because the update failed due to not enough free space. The new version of Installer.app claims to have a new "space available check" feature but this did not work the first time I've updated it. I did some tests later and it work correctly warning about the few available space.
Anyway to fix the problem you will need to SSH or SFTP into the iPhone:
WARNING: THIS PROCEDURE WORKED FOR ME AND IT SHOULD WORK FOR YOU BUT I WANT TO MAKE CLEAR THAT I'M NOT RESPONSIBLE OF ANY DAMAGE OR DATA LOST YOU MIGHT INCUR INTO SO PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Searching for Installer in the iPhone I've found the following file:
/private/var/root/Library/Installer/Temp/Installer.zip
I extracted the files using:
cd /private/var/root/Library/Installer/Temp/
unzip Installer.zip
and found that according to the date that was the new Installer.app folder but for some reasons it had been not cleaned up after the update. This was because the update failed.
The 8GB memory of the iPhone is partitioned in 2 parts. You can check the available space of each of them using the command "df" or "df -h".
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s1 614400 595568 12688 98% /
devfs 35 35 0 100% /dev
/dev/disk0s2 15244736 13792096 1452640 90% /private/var
The "/private/var" partition is where all the music and videos are saved.
The "/" is where the systems files and apps are installed and this is 300 MB.
This means that you can not install all the apps you would like even if you have 7GB free, because there is a limit to 300MB and most of this space is already filled with Apple stuff to make the iPhone work (i.e. OSX).
Mine was 100% full.
I had to free some space so I checked which app was taking more space than the others using the following command:
cd /Applications
du -hd 1
Apollo IM was taking 8.0MB so I deleted it using:
rm -Rf Apollo.app
I also deleted the current Installer.app folder:
rm -Rf Installer.app
(Actually I copied the folder somewhere else, just in case, but it turned out to be not useful so you can delete it as I did later.)
The last step was to copy the unzipped Installer.app folder in the /Applications folder to complete the update.
cp /private/var/root/Library/Installer/Temp/Installer.app /Applications/Installer.app
After that restart the iPhone, start Installer and don't forget to uninstall the App you previosly deleted (ex. Apollo) to free up some space.
Hope this helps
Cheers
