There is nothing keeping these people from doing this by themselves: stay home and do nothing (don't tend to household chores, or anything else, just to what you decided in advance to do, like reading or writing) if home is too busy, head down to the library and again, do what you planned to do, or a hotel and same.
Except, y'know, rent, property tax, the price of food...keeping the heat on, being able to afford gas, maintaining social relationships...it's almost like there's a lot of factors in this.
I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this, if not for the fact that iOS downgrades are literally impossible (outside a small window of time). Install an update and discover your phone is too slow? Either learn to live with it or buy a new phone.
Or you could just restore from a backup, possible at any time.
I used it for a while when first getting into IRC communities; it serves as a really nice gateway into it - extremely user-friendly, hackable, usable from my phone if I wanted. Generally just a really good client overall, despite the bloat.
To speculate: the AGPL is the most common license that keeps to the spirit of free software when it comes to licensing for anything that could possibly be used in a web-facing product. If they didn't use it, it's likely that someone would have made a company profiting off of their work by now.