It's the sad state of affair in "trusted" App Stores. Little Snitch is the first app I install on every machine. I look forward to a day when network access becomes a permission a sandbox app asks for.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...
VPNs are allowed and are natively supported, but I wouldn’t trust a random third party VPN.
If it were that important to me on iOS, I would host my own VPN server and just use the native support.
https://www.imore.com/how-configure-vpn-access-your-iphone-o...
But honestly, I hate ad supported software. Either give me away to remove ads via an in app purchase or I’ll just delete the app.
I bought an iOS device partially because I prefer the simple transaction model of giving Apple money and they give me stuff without subsidizing the purchase price with ads and invasive tracking.
Many “VPN apps” for iOS don’t do anything special except for automatically configuring VPN settings. As the article above stated, you can do the same thing manually by going to settings.
The VPN providers can sell services off the App Store and document the manual setup process.
This is something that the sandbox model already supports, but is granted by default to apps under the default profile for App Store apps.