Throwing money at the equipment won’t get you “the best” if you don’t make the effort to learn the basics of what elements separate a good photo from a great one. You just won’t know what to look for and won’t know when one camera is falling short in key areas of performance. And you won’t be able to tweak your own technique to compensate for shortcomings in the hardware or the circumstances.
We had a forum member who could take incredible photos with some very cheap Android phone cameras because he understood how to position himself and his subject in relation to available lighting. He wasn’t even necessarily messing around with advanced settings.
Leaving the skills of the photographer aside for a moment, all of the current flagship phones all have their respective strengths and weaknesses and those come into play under different lighting conditions so that no single choice can be the absolute best in all circumstances and to all tastes.
What these respective strengths and weaknesses are can easily be discovered researching various written reviews and You Tube reviews.
Offhand I can say from personal experience that a Pixel 2 will give you excellent results under the most widely varied situations with the least amount of effort on your part. But right now in true low light conditions without flash, the Samsung S9|S9+ is kicking butt. However, do you really want to go to Android?
I don’t think that’s necessary. Your iPhone 8 should be fine. Your X should be fine.
That being said, my personal frustration with iPhones right now: the 2017 iPhones and to a lesser degree the 2016 iPhones have a propensity to blow out highlights. I’m finding that extremely challenging to compensate for when snapping a spontaneous moment with kids or pets.
What this means is that in a scene or subject the lighter areas will be shown exceedingly lighter than everything else around them, making them almost glow and sadly lose detail. It’s this loss of detail that annoys me. I’ve seen other phone cameras do better so now I know what my iPhones are causing me to miss.
For example, in the photos of the dog kindly provided in the previous posts, the lighter fur around the muzzle is so bright it glows compared to the other areas of the dog’s face. This is not how the human eye would see that scene. The eye would see a brighter area but still be able to make out the texture of the fur. It wouldn’t be a brilliant light glow that obscures all detail.
The same shot taken with a Samsung S9 or S9+ would likely have a similar glow, but you would be able to make out the texture of the fur except in the brightest of the areas.
With a Pixel 2, likely all of the texture would remain visible and the lighter patches would still look like fur, but reflecting some of the light shining off of them. (The Pixel 2 cameras and software play with light in such a gentle, beautiful way).
That’s my best estimate of the likely outcomes based on many hours of testing and comparisons in various lighting situations using those cameras.
In the late part of 2015 into 2016 I had very little idea of the differences that could exist between different phone cameras. A little bit of intellectual curiosity was sparked by reading comments on this forum from truly experienced photographers and I set about researching and then trying out different phones and seeing the results firsthand. I am still a very basically skilled photographer myself, and rarely venture out of auto mode. Lol, basically what my research has done for me so far is make me a better shopper and better able to appreciate the artistry of others.
But I am finally finished with the shopping and the upgrading. I have the phones I intend to settle down with for the next few years and I’m now working on improving my skills on the tools I’ve chosen.
One last thing I wanted to clear up...about the iPhone X being a terrible low light camera. Well, I found it to be excellent in situations where I had no intention of using the flash. It’s the flash photography that is problematic on the X. Someone at Apple placed the flash in a bad position relative to the lenses so that photos of people and animals are plagued with glowing eyes for animals and red eyes for people. In videos, eyes are white and glowing. The flash also doesn’t illuminate a scene as pleasantly overall as flash did on the iPhone 7 Plus and on the 8 Plus. I never owned the smaller variants so I can’t speak to the quality of their flash photos.
It’s an unfortunate step back for the iPhone camera. Even some Android manufacturers who copied the look of the X’s camera bump did not copy the placement of the flash.
By the way, my observations pertain only to still photography. The comparisons of video capability is a whole other topic. iPhones are fine for that, but the audio could use a boost from an external mic.
(Edited, sorry for my many typos. I hope I’ve caught and fixed them all.)