I would wager that in the current age of iCloud backups, easily 95% of users have never used the cable to transfer data on/off their phone. I don't think I've use the cable for data transfer in maybe ten years?
Meanwhile, flagship Android phones can't match the CPU and GPU speeds nor the battery life of even years-old iPhones. I'd wager that's a much, much more important feature for most users.
> That's assuming you pay a not insignificant sum to have more than a paltry 5GB of iCloud space.
$0.99/mo is "not insignificant"?
I'm pretty sure they didn't mean the 50GB tier. That amount is also basically useless. The 200GB tier might work, and that's an extra hundred bucks over the life of a phone. If you want to backup a phone and offload a reasonable chunk of photos, you're at the $10 tier and that's a lot of money over multiple years of ownership.