Google's New VPN, Outline, Uses Chinese Technology That Intended To Circumvent GFW

Here is the news today:
Outline is a new app that developed by Google's sibling company, Jigsaw, to deliver a painless homebrew VPN service to anyone, with or without any tech background. It provides a simple one click deploy, easy to share way of DIY your own VPN service, for those who are privacy sensitive, yet without in depth knowledge of how to build one him or herself. And if you are curious, Jigsaw claims Outline has been audited by some independent security entity.
After reading various reports on the internet, and digging around this Outline by Jigsaw I was somewhat surprised. In fact, Outline In fact is not a conventional one click VPN installer and manager. It uses a so called SOCK5 technology. It may appear as a VPN on your phone or laptop, yet in its core, it uses another open source project, called Shadowsocks. And what is this Shadowsocks, it is the most popular tool for Chinese people to fight Chinese government's Great Firewall of China, GFW.
Here is some background story, in a Chinese point of view, for those lucky enough not living in China right now. GFW was built using a mixture of imported hardware and homebrew software, in order to censor the internet. GFW's system is believed to be built into the core internet infrastructure. At its beginning, GFW is just some IP blocking tool, to block some foreign websites' IP addresses. Soon it can do what people call "DNS poisoning", a more advanced way to block websites essentially. Then this GFW can use AI to detect and block certain connections on its own. It just keeps growing in its capabilities. Now it can block most kinds of VPN using packet inspection.
For any Chinese who wants to use "normal" internet to do stuff, like reading "real" news, watching youtube or just doing some research, GFW is a huge pain in the ass. I tried to use GFWed internet just to understand how it felt. It felt awful. Most of the services I am used to are blocked, and most of the foreign websites are slow as hell. Generally speaking, that's exactly what GFW is for. Censor the internet, and discourage Chinese from using foreign internet services that are not blocked already.
So, some years ago some programmer developed a tool to deal with this whole GFW mess. It ran on his own server outside of China. It worked really well so he decided to share it on github, and named it Shadowsocks. Its service side was originally written in python, with little cross platform compatibility. Soon Shadowsocks got very popular, many talented Chinese programmer got into the project. Now Shadowsocks is the only tool I know of, that is stable, cross platform, free and open source tool to use in China. Shadowsocks has been rewritten in several other programming languages including go, c, and java. It can be run on most of the VPS, routers, phones and computers. It is stealthy enough even state run GFW can't detect it. It is efficient enough to run on some cheapish barebone VPS. It is the first tool that comes to mind for any Chinese, to get connected to the "real internet".
It got so popular, its original author got a visit from Chinese police, then deleted his code on github. But no matter. There are now enough others working on it, and it gets update all the time.
For me personally, I got to know Shadowsocks back in my ingress days. Yeah, because ingress uses google's cloud services it got blocked at its start. But we play it all the same. At that time, with the help of Shadowsocks, me and my friends had loads of fun exploring the city. Now I have several Shadowsocks servers running, I have Shadowsocks clients running on all my devices. In fact without it I can't even use this Chromebook I am typing on. All thanks to this open source project, and its contributors, I can enjoy everything I love without the need of a passport and a flight ticket. And it's all free and open source.
Talking about "free", let's talk about what Shadowsocks, and, google's Outline, is and is not.
Outline (Shadowsocks) is:

1. open source
   
2. a free service, that is all its service and client services are free of charge. (except some on iOS, of course)
   
3. a great tool to deal with internet censorship.
   

is not:

1. completely free. You need to pay for your own VPS server.
   
2. run by any company. You do everything for yourself, and you have the control.
   
3. a tor alternative.
   
4. a VPN in traditional sense.
   

I don't want to and in fact can't go any further into Shadowsocks, Outline's underlining core technology. Just go to its github and read the code.
What is curious to me is that apparently someone outside China notices Shadowsocks and built a semi automated app around it. I haven't used Outline app myself. It probably won't work inside China, and I already have enough such severs myself. What I fear is, with google now using Shadowsocks, Chinese government would take some actions. And btw Outline uses Digital Ocean's VPS, does this mean DO will be soon blocked in China as well? I hope not.
At the same time, I really hope that with more and more people interested in Shadowsocks, it would grow more stronger and hardened enough to deal with GFW with some certainty. And with my brief introduction, more people, especially hackers would be motivated to do some work on this GFW blackbox. Hacking something else is fun, yeah, but hacking Chinese government's censor black box GFW? It should be challenging enough, and rewarding enough:

you can change million's people's lives.