Unfortunately, if the phone camera images are processed without oversharpening, the results are extremely soft.
Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.
> Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.
Not just phones. Most wide-angles for "serious cameras" have distortion and rely on digital correction. See [0] for an extreme example in the form of a 16mm Canon, which is much less wide than the iPhone lens.
[0] https://photographylife.com/reviews/canon-rf-16mm-f-2-8/2
Yeah, and even with sharpening it's noticeably softer when you zoom in on the photo.
For fisheye, I guess it would have been more accurate to say: the perspective distortion is present in both photos and is stronger for the iphone photo due to a shorter effective focal length, and there is no noticeable fisheye/barrel distortion in the iphone photo.
Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.