Although Status is a decentralised application, it uses a cluster hosted on scaleway.com which serves multiple purposes described below.
We have our own faucet sending ether on demand inside the application. This ether is mined by our cluster.
A bootnode from the Geth point of view is a stripped node which only participates in discovery (see https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/12503/what-is-the-bootnode-command-in-the-go-ethereum-documentation).
From the Status point of view, a bootnode is what helps a mobile node to get connected to other nodes AND where it can get blocks from. So, instead of being just a facility for discovering other nodes, nodes in our cluster also share their blocks to the requestor.
Such solution makes blockchain synchronisation of mobile nodes faster by making faster discovery. However, it only makes sense if the mobile node runs its local Ethereum node instead of using the remote (see about remote nodes: TBD).
As mobile nodes have limited computational power, we set PoW to a value that is lower than the geth's default value. This makes regular nodes unable to relay these messages and we allow cluster handle that.
Enodes are baked into mobile binaries and can't be changed without re-compiling. Specifically, their addresses may be found at https://github.com/status-im/status-go/blob/develop/static/config/cht.json along with CHT (Canonical Hash Trie) Ethereum block numbers.
Actual cluster deployment configuration can be found at https://github.com/status-im/status-cluster