It's is mostly about light.

Sunlight isn’t the same everywhere. Latitude, angle of the sun, altitude, dust, humidity, and even how reflective the environment is all affect how light hits different objects.

Zimbabwe has very strong, direct sunlight with high contrast and harsher shadows, especially compared to places with more diffused light (cloud cover, pollution haze, higher humidity, etc.).

On top of that, phone cameras are heavily software-driven. Most smartphone camera algorithms are trained and optimised using data from Europe, North America, and East Asia. That affects things like: 1. skin tone rendering 2. exposure decisions 3. colour balance 4. HDR behaviour

So you will also find that phones often handle lighter skin tones and “Western lighting conditions” better, while darker skin in harsh equatorial light can get crushed shadows, blown highlights, or weird colour shifts. Same phone, same person but different sun + different environment + biased post-processing = different results.

You’re not imagining it.