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I think the physical parameters of the lenses are negligible compared to the distortions caused by "computational computing" and the colour changes iPhones tend to add to make photos more instagramable by default.
Some of the distortion shown in the article is call "Volume Anamorphosis". It's a distortion that strongly deform face and person. This deformation is really visible for short focal lens.
Disclaimer: I work for a photo processing software.