The application, which allows users to add a pin on a map to show where ICE agents have recently been spotted, has climbed to the to the top of the App Store charts.
Someone knowledgeable enough would be able to figure out where every upload is going, I'd wager. But that would take Someone that is knowledgeable enough, as well as willing to expose an app like that given the potential consequences.
Federation is an overly complicated solution it's not required. It also wouldn't actually help, they can still take it off the app store there'd be another one but they would just play whack-a-mole and you can achieve the same thing with open source.
The best bet would be to have the database hosted outside the US and just have apps that pull the data from an API. There's no need for the app itself to store the data in fact that's a really stupid way to do it. You could federate it if you wanted but honestly that's probably unnecessary
If the internet is down then I don't have access to the app store. Also if the internet's down then the data is going to be out of date almost immediately anyway so any cached version would be useless.