Anything web-based works fine on the phone. FTP and SMB do not.

Not working on iOS is like saying "Oh, this road doesn't work with German made cars. That's not a big deal, is it?"

But we're talking about picking a thing to replace FTP for the use-cases people were already using FTP for. It doesn't matter if it doesn't do something FTP already doesn't do, because presumably you were already not relying on that thing getting done.

FTP is used to exchange files, a task that HTTP/HTTPS and/or email and/or IM and/or XMPP and/or Skype and/or Slack and/or a hundred other services can do just as well if not better.

More like German made cars have been artificially limited so they can't use certain roads.

...But it does work on iOS. It's just not built in. For example, Transmit for iOS supports FTP, and includes a document provider extension so you can directly access files on FTP servers from any app that uses the standard document picker.

https://panic.com/transmit-ios/

Searching the App Store I also see some apps for SMB, but I don't know whether they have document provider extensions.

You can also send faxes from iOS. What's your point?

The post I replied to implies that iOS is (somehow) "artificially limited" to be unable to access FTP - or at least I interpreted it that way.

FWIW, I'm not convinced that "web-based" is a better alternative for read/write file access, assuming you mean file manager webapps. No OS can integrate those into the native file picker, so you can't avoid the inefficiency of manually uploading files after changing them. WebDAV works pretty well though, if that counts...

It's just needlessly exclusionary. One of the greatest things about "the web" is it's pretty accessible by anyone with a browser that's at least semi-mostly-standards-compliant.

No one uses Windows mobile, that comment was hardly fair. Pretty sure Android is 80%+ share.

even mobile windows/ios/android have ftp and variants support via software but not native.