To begin with: Apps using such lists make it very clear upfront what they are doing. NOBODY OBFUSCATES THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THE LIST.

The list can also easily be a part of the repo that's pulled at runtime. Or viewable and modifiable from within the app itself.

It wasn’t encrypted.

It's a client side app, by definition there's no easy way to encrypt it. Dude certainly gave it a shot by base-64 encoding it. There was no technical reason to encode a text file.