You must have installed some niche piece of software that the vast majority of iPhone users will never use or hear about. Hopefully the indie dev keeps updating it and Apple never pulls it from the store!

In what world VLC is “some niche piece of software that the vast majority of iPhone users will never use or hear about”? You REALLY never heard of VLC?

VLC and free open source software certainly won't offer "just works". If you are happy to go down this path, then Android will offer more free open source apps for you.

It seems more likely that the majority of iOS users (and likely Android users too) just don't care.

I would be shocked if > 20% of Android users manage their own music library rather than using one of the standard music streaming services.

You've picked on iOS (incorrectly) for not being able to playback FLAC, then shifted argument. The point was proven that you don't need to buy into Apples ecosystem for this.

How do you play it? How do you import them into your library? If it's not mp3, aac, or m4a, iTunes won't index it, it won't end up in your library, and any of the standard music apps will not play it.

Speaking from experience because this is a continuing pain point for my music collection that includes oddball formats like flac, ogg, and others--none of which I can even get on my phone without using a cloud service.

I use VLC, which works great.

I don't use iTunes, ever, anywhere; and I feel sorry for anyone who does.

VLC, fine. How do you transfer .ogg or similar files to your iphone?

You can use iTunes, the VLC web interfacr, iCloud, Dropbox, NextCloud and probably a myriad of other ways I haven't considered.

It's not 2008 anymore.

I use Foobar2000 on iOS where you can toggle its embedded FTP server to transfer files, either to its own music library or one shared with iTunes. It's very easy.

Nevermind, looks like I had some conversion going on to get those files on my iPhone. It's irrelevant anyways, since AAC is audibly transparent to the human ear.

AAC may not be audibly transparent after its transcoded for Bluetooth. If you are using Apple headphones then this of course shouldn't happen, but for Sony's LDAC, better to start with FLAC.

Try using a custom ringtone that you do not purchase through the Apple store.

This used to bother me, but I haven’t used a ringtone at all for 10 years so I really don’t care anymore.

Although before that, I made my own ringtone using GarageBand off a ripped mp3 and didn’t buy anything through the apple store.

LOL yeah my ringtone for all calls is silence.

OK. https://www.wikihow.com/Set-a-Song-As-Your-Ringtone-on-iPhon...

I forget how I got it setup but I have a custom ringtone for one contact that I certainly didn’t buy.