>Dolphin held a pleasant surprise: it could detect my iPhone when it was plugged in. This made it a snap to transfer files to and from my phone as the file manager granted full file access to the iPhone

Wait, what? Is this true? Since when?

Do iphones show the file system as a USB storage or MTP device when plugged into a computer? If so, that has worked for many years.

You can also access the file system over the local network from Dolphin using KDE connect. I know that with Android the phone just appears as a drive and I think its the same with Apple devices.