Saurik: 18M devices running iOS 6 visited Cydia during evasi0n’s 6 week run

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.

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iOS 6.1.3 kills the jailbreak

It was fun while it lasted, but it appears that Apple has finally put an end to evasi0n. Earlier today, the company released iOS 6.1.3 to the masses, and as expected, it contains patches for multiple exploits used in the popular iOS 6.x jailbreak.

MuscleNerd confirmed our fears on Twitter just a few moments ago, pointing out that Apple has credited the evad3rs with the discovery of 4 of the 6 security flaws that were patched in today’s update. So jailbreakers should stay far away…

Here’s one of the exploits mentioned in the security briefing:

Kernel Available for: iPhone 3GS and later, iPod touch (4th generation) and later, iPad 2 and later Impact: A local user may be able to determine the address of structures in the kernel Description: An information disclosure issue existed in the ARM prefetch abort handler. This issue was addressed by panicking if the prefetch abort handler is not being called from an abort context. CVE-ID CVE-2013-0978 : evad3rs

Remember, as planetbeing explained in an interview last month, the evasi0n jailbreak relies on a number of exploits. So it’s not clear what this means exactly for the jailbreak community in the near future. But we’re guessing it’s not good news.

As for the distant future, though, the evad3rs have said that they still have several ‘major’ exploits in reserve, outside of what evasi0n used, so rest assured that we will see another jailbreak come around again. We’re just not sure when.

The evasi0n jailbreak tool was created by the evad3rs team—made up of MuscleNerd,pod2g, planetbeing, and pimskeks. It landed on February 4 of this year, and withstood two iOS software updates.

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