I am not a lawyer, so please take my conclusions with a grain of salt. But I tried to read more about the MPEG LA licensing, and this is what I have found:

The fact that neither of us finds any mention of MPEG LA licensing in x264 documentation does not mean that they don't apply. A detailed answer circa 2015 sums up that use of h264 binaries from either source may be problematic if these binaries come from a server which is under the US jurisdiction (GitHub is). The official binaries from https://artifacts.videolan.org/x264 are not hosted in the US (unfortunately, they don't include iOS or Android). The official binaries from https://github.com/cisco/openh264/releases/tag/v2.1.1 are covered by Cisco. That's why, to cover their $ss, they add the clause in their FAQ to explain what uses they don't cover: any other way to distribute the binaries that encode and/or decode H.264.

The MPEG LA license terms for codec manufacture (which may be interpreted to include binary distribution, and Cisco seems to have accepted this interpretation, or at least, its consequences) are listed on page 10 of https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avcweb.pdf:

Products sold to end users and OEM for PC but not part of OS (decoder, encoder or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = “unit”)

0 - 100,000 units/year = no royalty (available to one legal entity in an affiliated group)
US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units/year
Above 5 million units/year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit
Enterprise cap: $3.5M per year 2005-2006, $4.25M per year 2007-08, $5M per year 2009-10, $6.5Mper year 2011-2015; $8.125M in 2016 and $9.75M per year in 2017 through 2020

Enterprise selling branded OEM for PC OS ommitted for brevity, because they definitely don't apply to mobile-ffmpeg.

Includes right to manufacture and sell AVC encoders and decoders with the right of End Users to use them for personal and consumer (including internal business) purposes without remuneration but not for other uses.

I must confess that I don't understand the meaning of the last paragraph, but it definitely applies equally to openh264 and libx264.

By the way, similar rules apply to HEVC (a.k.a. H.265). The fact that libx264 and libx265 are GPL, does not matter for MPEG LA licensing. The question is whether the application that uses mobile-ffmeg, can be interpreted as selling the H.264 video.

TL;NR: there seems to be no justification to apply diferent policies to distribution of libx264 and openh264 binaries. It may be possible to have these binaries downloaded from the official sites, then MPEG LA licensing is not your problem. You can let the users download and build these libraries themselves, and again MPEG LA licensing is not your problem. Or, you can ignore the licensing problem altogether.

Uh oh!

[Android] Feature request: add openH264 cross-compile support #152

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