Absinthe A5 jailbreak tops one million downloads in 24 hours

pod2g and Chronic Dev Team’s jailbreak reached one million downloads within the first 24 hours of availability. The jailbreak, dubbed Absinthe, was released on Friday as the first untethered solution for iOS 5 users. It only supports the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 which both have Apple’s dual-core A5 chip inside, hence the nickname “A5 jailbreak.”

Clearly, there’s still a very high demand for jailbreaking. These stats only include downloads on Mac OS X, since the Windows version was posted after the first 24-hour period. I wouldn’t be surprised if pod2g and Chronic Dev Team’s already saw over two million downloads.

Although jailbreaking is a strong trend, in recent years it seems users’ reasons for jailbreaking has changed slightly. In the early days of iOS with the original iPhone and iPhone 3G, most wanted to jailbreak to get features that the iPhone was missing at that time. For me, the feature I wanted most was the ability to shoot video on my iPhone 3G, something that didn’t arrive until the 3GS. Now, iOS 5 is considered quite advanced and feature-packed so the focus hasn’t been on bringing totally new features to the phone, but rather improving upon what Apple has already implemented, such as Notification Center.

Jailbreak enthusiasts have been looking for a good option for iOS 5 for a while. Redsn0w managed to scrape something together shortly after the iPhone 4S debut, but it was a tethered jailbreak, and therefore unappealing to the masses.