People have built successful VPN services using Shadowsocks, and they are available on many platforms, like routers and embedded systems.

And the iOS version is more or less the author's recent efforts to build a VPN client that can run on non-jailbroken iPhone, much like Cisco AnyConnect.

I think shadowsocks' popularity as a whole concerns the chinese government, so they do their usual rooting out the leader thing: now that shadowsocks org is headless in the literal sense (no owner, no main repo), they hope its development will die out.