[mises]

This is some pretty heavy-duty obfuscation. What is the business case for this amount of work towards preventing reverse-engineering? Decent rate limiting should be much more effective than making such a herculean effort to obfuscate one's API.

Edit: another comment mentions that snap chat uses an existing solution, which makes more sense than the expense of developing this sort of obfuscation in-house: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23558784

[dannyw]

Specifically, Snapchat wants to stop "tweaks" and alternate frontends that allow for bypassing of Snapchat's self destruction controls.

This is especially important given that Snapchat is widely used to trade amateur underaged pornography.