The stats are in, and they are staggering. If you had any doubt that the iOS community yearned for more control over their devices, the writing is on the wall: Absinthe 2.0, the untethered jailbreak for devices on iOS 5.1.1, was downloaded nearly a million times between Friday and Sunday.
According to a tweet from the official Chronic-Dev Team, there were “211,401 jailbroken iPad3’s and 973,086 devices newly jailbroken” between Friday morning and Sunday at 6:30pm. Sure, the number doesn’t come close to the full iOS install base, but it’s an impressive number nonetheless.
Jailbreaking is a term that broadly defines opens up the core software to tweaks and theming, allowing for functionality that is otherwise unsanctioned by Apple. While it also unofficially allows for access to piracy through sideloading of apps, something that Apple has consistently disallowed since the first iOS version, jailbreaking on a broader sense allows for some incredibly useful interface changes, such as custom information on the lock screen, or changing the default browser.
If you’ve yet to download Absinthe 2.0 for iOS and are running 5.1.1, the Dev-Team has released an update to version 2.0.2 fixing some problems with the iPhone 4. Download it from their website.
