My problem with smartphone cameras(including iPhone) is that they completely misrepresent the scene. They try to make the colors of your photos as punchy as possible even when that's not actually what you're seeing. Older iphones used to capture accurate colors (which is why I preferred iphone cameras in the past) but now they produce the same over-saturated, over-sharpened images as every other phone these days.

If I want to make my photos punchy, I can do that in lightroom. For those who don't use lightroom, you can do that in the built-in photos app. My old iphone 6s produces much accurate colors than my iphone 11. On the iphone 11, colors are way off and images are so over-sharpened that I can see severe haloing around high-contrast areas.

And those awful noise-reduction watercolor textures... I wish they would just leave some noise as-is. Get rid of chroma noise (which is relatively easy), and leave some luminance noise around. I mean, luminance noise are actually quite nice as they are similar to film grain.

I can get pretty close to what I want with raw(not ProRaw), but you know, I can't even capture raw with their default camera app even when they are bloating it with useless(IMHO for a stock camera app) features like portrait mode, cinematic mode, photographic styles, filters etc.

I mean, I get why they are doing it; obviously because people like over-processed photos for their instagram. But it's my pet peeve...