Am I alone in the feeling that a lot of privacy related solutions are just paying for a promise? For example, a VPN can record all my requests, they just promise not to and I can’t verify it.
You are not, at some point you'll just have to trust someone. Just like that the app you submitted to the App Store is the same one you are downloading and hasn't been tampered with.
As always it's a matter of tradeoffs, if you just don't want to get tracked by ads it's probably a good solution. If you are afraid of some nation state trying to track you down, then probably not.
