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You may have looked on a bad one.

System-wide blockers on both iOS and Android do use the VPN API, but the idea is to intercept your outgoing traffic on the TUN interface, emulate the TCP/IP stack, and filter it locally, right on your device.

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How do you know which one the app is doing? From my perspective the vpn was “on”

Not perfect, but you could connect to wifi, and look at the connections the phone makes.

Of course, it could change its behavior if it detects a cellular connection...

A better way would be to download the app and reverse engineer the binary.

And do that every single time there’s an update?

or download an open source version on f-droid

The easiest way would be to visit a website like "whatsmyip" and check that your IP address stays the same.

Exactly. It's a VPN in name only, and the only reason is to route traffic to be able to bypass the security features in the OS.

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