[movedx]

Cost of what, exactly? An (free) TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt?

[stickfigure]

I'm guessing that when you start snooping on the everyday mobile activity of 1.3 billion citizens you hit the kind of scaling problems that usually only Facebook and Google see.

[gscott]

Considering China records and stores millions of hours of video data among other things they are probably getting pretty good at snooping.

[movedx]

There's probably (simple/cheap) ways to overcome that, but I see your point.

[grkvlt]

Cost of servers to handle millions of TLS connection initialisations and HTTPS stream decryptions, versus simple plain-text streaming...

[movedx]

TLS isn't the only option, though. You could use TLS on setup to share a pre-computed secret between the device and the remote server, then bin the TLS connection. After that, encrypt and forward over HTTP.

Laziness isn't an excuse.

[grkvlt]

FYI, the mechanism you describe is (essentially) how TLS works...