...it's easy to see why: in these paranoid times, with the NSA allegedly sniffing around the world's collective inbox, and lots of software on the market designed to snoop into people's lives, it's comforting to have an app that'll vaporize your messages within seconds of their opening

So, Snapchat's wild success is from people paranoid of the NSA who use it to send messages, even though multiple stories have appeared about how Snapchat messages can be saved without the sender's knowledge, and Snapchat's own website lists conditions under which messages will be preserved. Riiiiight.

...it doesn't store user information on its servers

Even assuming it doesn't store images (which it does, see above), to use the application, you connect with people as in any other social networking application. This is definitely "user information," and this metadata (some might even call it data) has value.

Notifications from a calculator app? No, I wouldn't find them acceptable, ever. Why not just pop up a "Did you know?" screen when they start up the app? Limit it to once a day, and be sure to include a "Don't show me these tips anymore" button. They've started the application, therefore they're more likely to pay attention to what you're saying than if you broadside them with a notification.

There are plenty of software documentation sets, tutorials, etc, like this one (selected at random), that have Step 0, Step 1, etc. I think it's an attempt to be clever, in that offsets start with zero, and this is documentation about computer stuff, being read by developers. But items in a list, intended to be read by humans, shouldn't be represented by offsets, but numbered with counting numbers, that is, starting at 1.

I've never understood the whole "Your download will start in n seconds" countdown, followed by an automatic download (hopefully). Is there a reason they do that instead of simply giving you a link to the file? To be fair, this behavior isn't recent; it's done that for years.

Not open source? The source is available for download here.

You certainly can compile it yourself; I built it on my old Linux iBook G4 (PowerPC), since there were no binaries available for that platform. As has been discussed above, it does have a weird license, but it is absolutely open source.

I don't understand the expression of surprise in the first part of the summary. The "cafes" referred to are set up specifically to skirt the state gambling laws by taking advantage of the "sweepstakes" loophole. They make it appear that you're playing video poker, roulette, etc. but you're really just revealing your sweepstakes winnings, which were predetermined when you bought into the game. Bloomberg Businessweek had an interesting article on these things a few years ago.

... rather than at conventional Internet cafes.

I'm not sure what "conventional Internet cafes" refers to. The idea of the "Internet cafe" as a place where people go to buy time on the Internet died shortly after it was born in the late 90's. You can still go to Starbucks, Panera, etc. and use the Internet there; this bill isn't aimed at that. This is not a big deal.