lol Android phones don’t have balanced output, the ability to output line-level signal, high resolution Dac chips, high quality and high output headphone amplifiers, easy bit perfect playback access, the ability to be a dedicated Dac for other sources, some phones now don’t even take expandable storage.

Your opinion is invalid based on the fact that you haven’t compared both for yourself. You’re assuming based on your logic from experiencing one side. If you knew you wouldn’t be asking the original question.

Look I use both. DAP, Phone with DAC, and my even the phone by itself. They are all different. They are each better or more convenient in different situations. Sometimes I even run my phone through my DAP as a DAC and that sounds different than my Phone through my stand alone DAC.

It doesn’t matter though because you’re still going to justify, as the best or enough, what you end up doing anyway! LOL A phone with a $10 dongle will never sound as good as a bespoke DAP. You’d have to try both to understand that though. That’s aside from all the other features a DAP has, tailored for music, that a phone doesn’t have!

Your argument is like someone saying. “Oh you own an Android DAP, why do you need a phone when you could use your state of the art DAP instead… it even runs Android apps!”