The Evad3rs Jailbreak Team, four hackers who go by MuscleNerd, Planetbeing, Pimskeks and Pod2G, released their evasi0n untethered jailbreak tool four days ago and now, 7 million iOS devices have already been busted wide open, Jay Freeman, the owner of the jailbreak store, Cydia told Forbes.
That would make this the most quickly-adopted jailbreak tool of all time. As of Thursday night, 5.15 million iPhones, 1.3 million iPads and 400,000 iPods, all jailbroken with evasi0n and running iOS 6.1, have visited Cydia. The jailbreak works on iPhone 5, the iPad 3, iPad mini and allows users to remove all of Apple's installation restrictions, Andy Greenberg reports from Forbes in his breakdown of the evasi0n tool, the most elaborate to date.
Jailbreaking is similar to rooting in Android phones in that it allows more customization options and enables functions such as wireless tethering that would otherwise be locked down.
Part of the reason for the demand, said Freeman, is that the iPhone 5 has taken the longest to crack out of any other OS. Compared to the iPhone 4S's 98 days, the iPhone 4's 38 and iPhone 3GS's 14, iOS 6.1 took 136 days, with millions of users eagerly awaiting the hack. Apple also sold 136 million iPhones in 2012, which would have increased the number of people who want a crack as well.
The team exploited five new bugs to break down Apple's protection against OS modifications. Yesterday, the team announced that update 6.1.1 has already been rolled out to developers as a beta, and the bugs have very likely already been patched out so anyone who wants to jailbreak their devices and is still on iOS 5.x had better do it soon while they still have the option.
“Smart phones have become more and more popular, but they’ve maintained a closed experience that makes it difficult for people to get what they want,” Freeman told Forbes. “Therefore people have needed to turn to jailbreaking to fill the gap.”
In its first six hours online, Freeman said, the crack had already been used on 800,000 devices, which is a conservative estimate because the torrent of traffic that flooded Cydia knocked his server offline several times.
