How to make decisions for which Apps to use?

[HauntSanctuary (Privacy is Undead)]

Your firewall app is useless because it is on top of the OS. Apple tunnels their internal ecosystem undee their system firewall, so due to the proprietary nature of MS as well, we may not know easily if they do the same.

You can use a firewall appliance like pfsense that sits outside the OS and filters things in the network itself but that involves learning something new.