Latest iOS jailbreak: Nearly 7 million served

The latest iOS jailbreak that works on devices running iOS 6.x has been used to crack almost 7 million iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches, according to Cydia admin Jay Freeman. Freeman's comments were published by Forbes on Friday morning, highlighting the continued popularity of jailbreaking among certain segments of the iOS-using community.

The latest jailbreak tool, called "evasi0n," was released on Monday of this week—the first iOS jailbreak to be released in quite some time. Freeman says it took 136 days to crack iOS 6.1, compared to the previous jailbreak taking 98 days, and the one before that taking 38 days. “That’s what made this such a landmark jailbreak,” Freeman told Forbes. “It had been so long and we were all so hungry for it.”

Unlike some of the others, the evasi0n jailbreak is untethered. The tool works by exploiting an undocumented flaw within iOS 6, and although the first beta of iOS 6.1.1 was released to developers after the jailbreak was published, the update has yet to fix the flaw that makes the jailbreak possible.

Apparently, there were millions of users just waiting to apply evasi0n to their devices in order to customize them and install non-App-Store software. According to Freeman, the tool was used on 5.15 million iPhones, 1.35 million iPads, and 400,000 iPod touches in the first four days since release. Cydia, which acts as a repository for jailbreak software, has seen “insanely more new traffic” since the evasi0n release, said Freeman—he doesn't have numbers on the popularity of previous jailbreaks but is confident that the latest tool is the most popular yet.

Despite its obvious popularity, iOS users shouldn't hold their breath when asking themselves whether Apple will eventually "break" the jailbreak. Apple often patches security holes as soon as they're public or exploited in some way, so it's only a matter of time before an updated version of iOS 6.x comes out that fixes the vulnerability used by evasi0n. As mentioned earlier, the first beta of 6.1.1 has yet to do so, but we wouldn't be surprised to see a future beta release that renders evasi0n dysfunctional.