“Over the last half a week, Apple has been hit with the largest mass-hacking incident in its history. And the perpetrators were the company’s own users.
Nearly seven million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners have cracked Apple’s restrictions on their devices using the jailbreaking tool Evasi0n since the tool was released Monday morning, according to the latest count from Jay Freeman, the administrator of the app store for jailbroken devices known as Cydia. That makes the iOS-hacking app the fastest-adopted jailbreak software of all time, Freeman says.
As of Thursday night, Freeman’s alternative app store had received visits from 5.15 million iPhones, 1.35 million iPads, and 400,000 iPod touches that were jailbroken with evasi0n, the first jailbreaking software for the iPhone 5 and iOS 6.1.
Though he doesn’t have exact figures for previous jailbreaks, Freeman says that evasi0n has brought Cydia “insanely more new traffic” than the release of the jailbreak tool called Absinthe that worked on some versions of iOS 5. And even Jailbreakme3, the popular web-based jailbreak released by iPhone hacker Comex in the summer of 2011, was only used on 1.4 million devices in its first nine days online, Comex told me at the time.
That increased demand is due in part to a larger number of iPhones on the market–Apple sold 136 million phones in 2012, according to the latest figures from analyst firm Canalys. But Freeman argues that evasi0n’s popularity also comes from the fact that those devices still remain far too tightly locked down for many users, who want the ability to download apps Apple has kept out of its strictly filtered app store, or to customize their phone’s appearance and settings in ways Apple doesn’t allow. “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,” he says. “Therefore people have needed to turn to jailbreaking to fill the gap.” …”
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