Yesterday, we bid farewell to one of the most infamous jailbreaks of all time: evasi0n. Born on February 4, it lasted nearly 6 weeks before Apple finally disabled it by way of the iOS 6.1.3 software update it issued yesterday.
It certainly served its purpose though. According to Jay Freeman, aka Saurik, Cydia saw more than 18 million unique iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, running iOS 6 (or later), visit during the jailbreak’s 6-week long run…
Forbes Andy Greenberg, speaking with Freeman, reports:
“In the six weeks since evasi0n was released, however, close to 18 million devices have already been jailbroken, according to data from Jay Freeman, the administrator of the Cydia app store for jailbroken devices. He says he’s counted 18.2 million unique devices running iOS 6 visiting Cydia, including 13.8 million iPhones, 3.4 million iPads, and 1.1 million iPod Touches.”
It’s worth noting, though, that it’s quite possible evasi0n isn’t responsible for jailbreaking all 18 million devices. While they have their caveats, both RedSn0w and Sn0wBreeze have the ability to jailbreak older devices on iOS 6.
But even if it only accounted for 17 million, that’d still be impressive. As Greenberg points out, Comex’s popular JailbreakMe 3 hack was only used around 2 million times during its life cycle—remember, though, it only lasted 9 days.
The evasi0n jailbreak lasted for 43 days, and through 2 software updates. Apple finally took it out yesterday, patching multiple exploits used in the hack. Four of the update’s six security fixes were attributed to the evad3rs.