The Absinthe jailbreak for Apple’s A5 devices was downloaded 1 million times in one day

It appears as if jailbreaking is still a hugely popular option for those looking to extend or modify their iOS devices. The newly released Absinthe jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 devices was downloaded over 1 million times in its first 24 hours of release, reports Alex Heath at Cult of Mac.

The news comes via Joshua Hill, an iPhone hacker better known as p0sixninja and a member of the Chronic Dev Team. Hill’s group, along with a bevy of other hackers,  including saurik & MuscleNerd, both core members of iPhone Dev Team and hackers pod2G and planetbeing  came together to complete what was one of the toughest jailbreaks to execute in the history of the ‘liberation’ of Apple’s mobile devices.

Hill says that 1 million downloads were recorded on January 20th, and those numbers don’t include the Windows version of the hack, which was made available the next day.

Jailbreaking is the process by which an iOS devices’ software is altered to allow the installation of third-party applications un-approved by Apple. Some popular examples of these include data tethering applications that are not dependent on carrier support, themes and skins that alter the appearance of a device and various utilities that extend the capabilities of iOS.