If you’ve got an HTC Inspire 4G, HTC Aria, or Samsung Captivate on AT&T, you should soon be receiving notification of an OTA update that will finally enable your phone to install apps from “unknown sources”, letting you access Amazon’s Appstore or install non-marketplace apps of your choosing.

After a long period of restricting its Android users to only the official Google-run Android Market, AT&T announced this spring that it would finally start looking into letting its customers install apps from additional sources. It wasn’t clear then if that just meant the carrier would individually approve additional app stores like Amazon’s, or take a full hands-off approach and give users the option to install from any source they chose. According to the leaked screenshot that brings us this news, it looks like the latter will be true, representing a major 180-shift for the carrier.

The leaked notice reveals that all future AT&T phones should be unrestricted as well, and that updates like those going out now to the Inspire 4G, Aria, and Captivate should be coming to additional Androids soon. AT&T noted that it may only update select devices, but hasn’t revealed any specific models that wouldn’t be contenders for this treatment. It certainly looks like most current Androids will be covered, but AT&T notes that they’ll need to be running Froyo or better; better luck next time, Flipout owners.

Source: Android Central