With Phoenix, you weren’t actually opening a channel with an outside node.
Your channel(s) were between Phoenix’s central node and a “virtual node” for you.
Then they could open outbound channels to a bunch of other nodes. This simple aspect removes a lot of friction for the user.

But as @Deleted Account  alluded to, there is a lot of visibility and lack of privacy on Phoenix’s end. They can see everything going on. 

 Yeah for sure. As I understood it they were actually doing the routing on their side were they not? I wasn’t really worried about privacy with their wallet or I wouldn’t have been using it, I just wanted a self custodial option that was easy to use.