I've never tried Kiwi Browser but had similarly come across it while searching. The dev themselves refers to them as ads[1] (2022), though prior to being accepted properly into Bing's referral program Kiwi redirected all search queries through their own servers[2][3] (2021) (the original Kiwi repo's issues tab has been deleted since).

Tbf the dev always sounds reasonable in their responses but was a little off-putting initially so I kinda understand the GP's impression.

[1] https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next/issues/91#issuecomme...

[2] https://github.com/Tobi823/ffupdater/issues/35

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210605191305/https://github.co...