iPhones are actually quite good. I've used them, starting with the iPhone 4 in several documentary projects. And have also shot with them over long periods of time exclusively, and am using an iPhone 6+ at the moment - an excellent camera.
I've used the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 6s, and while they are good for a cell phone, I wouldn't call them "quite good" by any stretch of the imagination. Indoors, they're quite frequently a blurry mess.
The strength of a photograph and the power they release to a viewer has very little to do with what camera was used. Rather, it's about the photographer, his/her life experiences, eye, curiosity, imagination, how the photographer relates to people, the ability to compose and decide what context should or shouldn't be in the frame, and on and on.
What you're failing to mention there is that unless a photo is deliberately posed, a great deal of the strength of a photograph comes from getting the shot timing exactly right. When split-second timing matters, the capabilities of the camera matter a great deal in terms of whether you'll get the shot at all or it will be a blurry or noisy mess. Even minor differences like IS can have a huge impact on your "keep rate", which in turn affects how likely you are to get that really great shot or miss it. And the differences between a tiny cell phone sensor and a full-frame sensor are (literally, in some ways) like night and day when shooting indoors, even
with the iPhone's amazing attempts at faking it by taking multiple shots and looking for the best one. (Before that, cell phone cameras were such garbage that I basically didn't even bother to try using them except outdoors.)
Cell phones take acceptable photos under ideal circumstances, but if I tried to use an iPhone as my only camera, the hardware would severely limit what, where, and how I shoot. There would be lots of shots that I simply could not get (or that would require a helicopter to get, or that would require me to have multiple people in multiple places to get) with a cell phone camera because of the lack of a useful optical zoom range. (In a pinch, I can pull off an ~78:1 zoom range optically with my DSLR using just the gear I carry around with me, and if I could afford the right lenses, I could go as high as ~458:1. Try that with a cell phone.)
And even if I were willing to put up with special cell phone cases and carry around external lenses (which kind of defeats the whole "the best camera is the one you have with you" thing) there would still be many times when I would be forced to say, "You know what, there's not enough light in here. Let's go outside." So I'd get
a photo with the cell phone, but it wouldn't be the same photo. Whether that photo would be better or worse is entirely subjective, obviously, but it would be objectively different, solely because I would be constantly running into the limits of the hardware.
And it isn't just the light gathering, either. It's also resolution and noise margins. I'm shooting with a ~30 MP full-frame camera these days. I could very nearly crop by 2:1 and still end up with a photo of the same resolution as an iPhone 7 camera. This means framing isn't as critical, and I can afford to shoot at a wider zoom setting and crop later, giving me a much lower risk of blowing a shot because something or someone moved too far at the wrong time.
And I can crank that camera up to ISO 12,800 comfortably (it goes higher), compared with the iPhone 7's maximum possible ISO of only 1600. Obviously, the extra ISO makes the image noisier, but the extra resolution means that I can also crank up the noise reduction after the fact and still get an acceptable image. With the iPhone, by the time you DNR a 12 MP image enough to look good at ISO 1600, you've lost enough effective resolution that it won't look good at larger print sizes.
And larger sensors tend to provide more contrast range, and thus better recovery of bright and dark areas at any given ISO. So when (not if) some of the shots are over-exposed or under-exposed, you'll be more likely to recover them with a real camera than with a smartphone—much more likely, in fact.
So what all this adds up to is that yes, if you're willing to limit yourself to situations that a smartphone handles easily, you can get great shots with a smartphone, but unless you restrict your shooting environment to work within your smartphone's limitations, for every great shot you get, you'll miss a dozen or even a hundred because you couldn't salvage them, whereas those of us shooting with actual cameras might toss one in ten on a bad day, or one in a hundred on a good day. If it really matters, there's no substitute for a real camera with a decent-sized sensor and a good set of lenses.
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Not really. Take this on a real dedicated camera, or seen in real life with the human eye, the edges around the dog would be sharp not blurred. The only blurring should be coming from the stuff behind the doggy. The software for this iPhone effect has some way to go to reach the level it aims to achieve.
Not software. Hardware. What makes that shallow depth of field truly possible on a DSLR is the width of the lens relative to the exit pupil (which essentially translates to sensor size). The cameras are, I suspect, too close together to get an accurate enough depth map. Also, with real lenses, you get a bit of optical blurring at high-contrast edges where you see a tiny bit of what's behind the subject bleeding into the edges (despite being perceived as "sharp"), and there's no way to simulate that with only two lenses because you can never see what's behind the subject on both sides at once (because one of the cameras has to provide the image that you actually use as the perspective of the shot).
In fact, to get the effect completely right, you would need a minimum of five sensors—one above, one below, and one on either side of the main camera—so that you get a little bit of what's behind the subject in all four directions. The lack thereof is, I believe, part of the reason why you frequently see bizarre artifacts like perfectly sharp background under somebody's arm. And even if they had five sensors, it would still probably end up guessing at times; it would just be a more educated guess.
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