IRCs are extremely laggy on populated servers. It would be better if sk made his own integrated chat feature
We used to have an IRC (attempted twice, actually) so I don't know how inclined sk will be to try that again. As far as a way to chat outside of Minecraft, there once was a Jabber (Google Talk) bot that eventually borked. I have considered the possibility of an Android application myself. It's more than feasible (as I can write it, etc.). What features do you think it should have? A news feed similar to that in the launcher is easy, but what else should the app have?
I quickly threw together a basic app that has access to the launcher news feed, a server status page (work in progress here, no promises), and a quick reference section (also work in progress).
Quick update: I have added a better news feed (the same one in the Alice launcher), quick reference links to the Alice reference page (it's super ugly, so this will change as I have a better idea), and opening the SKCraft webpage in a browser will prompt you to use the app instead (optional, app doesn't allow for forum navigation). I will get an .apk for those of you running Android 4.0 and later up tomorrow.