If ever, we needed confirmation that the world of jailbreaking is still an alive and kicking community-driven activity, then it sure is. Today we are seeing the revelation that the recently released Absinthe tool, which is used to offer freedom to owners of A5 devices received more than one million downloads in a single day.
Owners of the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 had to sit patiently and watch older generation device owners receive the gift of an untethered jailbreak on iOS 5.x thanks to developer Pod2g and his assembled ‘Dream Team’. But when the day eventually came when the jailbreaking tools for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S were released, it was probably the biggest gift developers have given to the jailbreaking community.
Chronic Dev Team member Joshua Hill, better known by his online name P0sixninja, has revealed the staggering statistics. What makes this an even more impressive statistic is that all of the downloads were recorded on the 20th of January, which was the day before the Windows version of Absinthe was released, meaning that more than one million Mac owners attempted to jailbreak their A5-based iOS devices on the first day alone.
The pursuit of the untethered jailbreak for A5-powered devices has been one of the most reported on since the practice of freeing iOS devices began. The length of time taken led some people to criticize the community efforts, believing that Apple had possibly created a firmware which could not be bypassed on those particular devices. French developer Pod2g, who discovered the initial bug in iOS 5 in November 2011 was at the forefront of the whole development process and combined his efforts with the Chronic and iPhone Dev Teams, along with legendary security researcher PlanetBeing and Cydia creator Jay Freeman in order to prove that jailbreaking was still alive and kicking.
When the A5 jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 were released, a number of tools were offered to the community, created by each of the two main development teams involved. The Chronic Development team offered a Windows and Mac version of the Absinthe tool, whereas the iPhone Dev Team produced a command line interface tool, which offered the ability to jailbreak the devices by using a command prompt interface as well as offering in-depth debugging options.
If the one million downloads only include the Mac version of Absinthe, I am extremely interested in seeing the accumulative downloads of all tools on all platforms.
For jailbreaking iPhone 4S and iPad 2, you can simply follow our step by step guide posted here to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 using Absinthe on Windows or Mac. For those of you with iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 1, and iPod touches can use Redsn0w or Sn0wbreeze to untether jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1.
(via CultOfMac)
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