According to developer and hacker Joshua Hill, the latest jailbreak for devices running Apple’s A5 processor has been downloaded more than one million times in one day, Cult of Mac reports. The new jailbreak – dubbed Absinthe – was released for Mac OS X on Friday after months of speculation as to whether it was possible to hack into Apple’s new CPU architecture. The Absinthe jailbreak supports the latest version of iOS, iOS 5.0.1; iOS 5 was released in October, and users of iPhone 4S and iPad 2 have been waiting for a fully untethered jailbreak solution compatible with their devices since then.

According to Cult of Mac, one million downloads were achieved on Mac OS X alone as a Windows version of the jailbreak was released after the initial 24 hours. As Alex Heath notes, this figure is noteworthy as it seems to confirm that interest in jailbreaking devices hasn’t died down after the release of iOS 5; the operating system introduced more than 200 new features for iPhone and iPad as we detailed back in October. If anything, it was iOS 5 itself that led developers to create new apps and tweaks that are taking advantage of the latest features offered by Apple such as Notification Center and Twitter integration.

To put the A5 jailbreak’s numbers into context: one million downloads were reached in 24 hours by JailbreakMe 3.0 as well when it came out for iOS 4 devices last summer. Currently, the Absinthe jailbreak is available for OS X and Windows machines over at Greenpois0n.com.

Update: With a tweet, MuscleNerd says that 205,000 new Cydia accounts were created by Sunday morning, suggesting that a large percentage of Absinthe early adopters were users who had jailbroken their devices in the past, thus likely already having a Cydia account. See update below.

According to @saurik’s server, there were 205K new Cydia installs by Sunday morning :)

— MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) January 23, 2012

Update #2: Whilst we assumed “new Cydia installs” referred to the amount of new accounts created last weekend, MuscleNerd has clarified the figure indicates how many times Cydia was launched on a unique A5 device.

@SebastienPage it’s how many times Cydia was launched at least once on a unique A5 device — MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) January 23, 2012
 

@SebastienPage right, that 205K is just new A5 installs, nothing A4 or lower

— MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) January 23, 2012

Update #3: Cydia creator Saurik chimes in with more numbers, clarifying that 205,000 were the iPhone 4S units with Cydia until Sunday morning.

So, @MuscleNerd’s 205k number was just the number of on-Cydia iPhone 4S’s; I believe that is now 494k. iPad 2 5.0.1 adds an additional 463k.

— Jay Freeman (saurik) (@saurik) January 23, 2012

Update #4: And last, the Dev-Team has published a blog post with the official numbers since Friday morning:

• 491,325 new iPhone 4,1 devices (4S)
• 308,967 new iPad 2 devices
• 152,940 previously jailbroken (at 4.x) iPad 2 devices

For a total of 953,232 new A5 jailbreaks in over three days. At this point, if the previous 1 million/24 hours figure is to be believed, it’s possible 1 million downloads actually happened in 24 hours, but many users couldn’t immediately run Absinthe due to the server problems that affected Greenpois0n.com.