The Catalan independence movement is being coordinated by an app designed for revolutions

Completely agreed. The article is not very well written, but I have to note is not a “the Guardian” but “Wired”. Unfortunately Wired’s article quality has been dropping down considerably.

The only mention I found on the Guardian was this article

When news came through of the sentencing of the Catalan prisoners, Tsunami used Twitter, Telegram and word of mouth to get people to the airport.
It has more than 320,000 subscribers on Telegram and rolled out a new app of its own after the airport occupation. To access it, the user needs a QR code that it scans from another, trusted user. So far, more than 15,000 people have downloaded the new app, which has yet to be used in any action.