The elephant in the room in this discussion is OS level permissions to access files and information on the phone from outside the app. The app can do whatever

The elephant in the room in this discussion is OS level permissions to access files and information on the phone from outside the app. The app can do whatever it wants, but if I disable it’s access to the internet at a system level it’s not getting access to the internet. Even desktop OSes work like this. Just because I install a piece of software on my laptop does not mean that it gets root access.