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They break all the time.Never been a brand zealot, never will be, but also almost never seen what you say either. I used Androids for almost 6 years before jumping to iPhones. Androids were consistently unreliable and had to be repaired or changed often -- severely lagging just mere months after a buy, bugs that go unfixed for a full year, displays randomly getting super dim, batteries getting hot and going to 60% of the original capacity in just several months, volume buttons breaking etc. I am on my 3rd iPhone and I completely forgot that my phone can be a source of trouble. I have no reason to make this up. I am a normal consumer who goes after reliability.
I understand that many people are somewhat offended by Apple's mere existence (because they indeed do plenty of shady stuff) but please strive to be more objective. Not everything that Apple does is bad and your generalization is not helpful.
And as another poster said, any smartphone will break if you're rough with it. I've seen my fair share of drunk girls dropping their phone on a concrete floor, clumsily trying to pick it up, proceed to fall ass-first directly on it, and then rage how the phone is "trash for breaking as easily".
> In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones.
I live in a capital city (~2.5M people) and I know a smartphone shop owner who also owns 2 service/repair shops. He gave up on repairing Androids because Android users are very price-sensitive (his words): "they buy a phone for 220 EUR and when they hear a replacement for the display they broke is 90 EUR they just say: screw that, I'll buy a new one, or just grumpily leave". He was paying 2 Android phone technicians to basically sit around twiddling their thumbs all day, for basically 4-8 repairs a month, so he let them go and paid for his iPhone technicians to learn Android repairs for the occasional customer who needed them.
The iPhone "repairs" were mostly routine work in comparison: many people, myself included, routinely swap the battery when it reaches 80% capacity (because at that point you do notice a reduced battery life). Often people break their displays so they need new ones. Very rarely they had to actually replace a logic board or anything else internally.
The shop owner also told me that he can count on the fingers of one hand the iPhones he has to completely replace in warranty during any given 3-6 months period.
As is the case with 98% of everything, the reasons for a phenomena are economic. No grand conspiracies or big bads.