Doing it this way means that Apple can't just block them by IP address, it avoids them having to distribute their "secret sauce" (understanding the iMessage protocol is clearly very valuable), and it potentially allows them to use actual Apple code on their servers (in case they haven't spent the time to fully break the fairplay obfuscation that Apple is using for some of their keys).

Here's what I'm seeing: every time I send it a message, I get a packet from Apple, and then immediately the app sends a packet of almost exactly the same size to 222.77.191.206 (which is listed in this application's APK as "ServerIp"). It then gets back two packets from the Chinese server, the first of which I'm presuming is the decoded result and the second packet being a response to send Apple (as immediately a packet is sent back to Apple with about the same size).

Additionally, if you read the reviews of this application, the author is making some very weird responses to people with login issues: he's asking for their Apple ID, as apparently that's enough for him to debug their issue. That shouldn't be possible if the application is just directly talking to Apple the entire time.

[edit: The more I stare at this, the more confident I am in this analysis; specifically, the packets that are "about" and "almost exactly" the same size are very deterministic: the packets to/from Apple are precisely 7 bytes larger than the corresponding packets to/from the Chinese server.]

[edit: It also occurred to me to verify the other direction: in fact, if you go to send a message, first the client sends something to the developer's server, which then returns a packet which, along with again the exactly 7 extra bytes, is sent to Apple's server.]

I strongly suspect they were able to get a copy of the kernel source code... They could be doing anything with it.. Porting it to a new platform.. Compiling it with unsafe GCC flags.. Or worse..

Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when "institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them.

I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it. Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future, nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil".

The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best.

So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value. Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System, people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense, replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying.

It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect that it's gone for good.

And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.