Over 1,000,000 iPhone 4S And iPad 2 Jailbreak Downloaded In Just 24 Hours And 250,000

The Chronic Dev Team has released their new tool Absinthe last Friday to untethered jailbreak the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 on iOS 5 / 5.0.1. The jailbreak was long anticipated which caused many to be unable to download the jailbreak due to the huge traffic on the Greenpois0n.com servers.

1,000,000 Absinthe Downloads in 24 hours

According to a CultofMac report, Joshua Hill AKA p0sixninja has told them that Absinthe had been downloaded more than 1,000,000 on January 20th even before the release of the Windows version of the jailbreak tool.

The success of Absinthe is notable in light of Apple’s recent software releases. Apple added over 200 new features in iOS 5 (several of which originated in the jailbreak community). Many argued that iOS 5 would remove the need to jailbreak because Apple had covered most of the bases this time around. Theoretically, if there are less reasons to jailbreak, then less people will jailbreak their devices. As the success of Absinthe illustrates, that is not the case.

The web-based JailbreakMe 3.0 to jailbreak iPad 2 on iOS 4.3.3 was the last jailbreak that was received with this kind of anticipation and jailbroke 1,000,000 iPad 2s on the first day of its release.

250,000 New Cydia Installs Over The Weekend

MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev Team has announced on his twitter account that over 250,000 new Cydia installs were made over the weekend. This indicates that a huge section of Absinthe downloads were for first-time jailbreakers that created a Cydia ID.

The Dev Team Official Blog Post

The iPhone Dev Team has posted on his blog the details on A5-based iOS device jailbreaks over the weekend.

• 491,325 new iPhone4,1 devices
• 308,967 new iPad2 devices
• 152,940 previously jailbroken (at 4.x) iPad2 devices

Total: 953,232 new A5 jailbreaks in a little over 3 days
The reason these numbers can be so precise is that one of the housekeeping activities that happens when you launch Cydia is a query to @saurik’s server for the list of available SHSH blobs.  (Even if you have none on file, the query is still made).