iPhone Beats Android in Space With a Historic Shot

An iPhone has just pulled off a brag that no Android phone can touch. Not in a lab. Not in a marketing stunt. Out in deep space, where the view is bigger than any billboard and the margin for error is razor thin.

During NASA’s Artemis II mission, astronauts captured striking images of Earth using the iPhone 17 Pro Max, making it the first smartphone ever used to photograph our planet from deep space. The shots show Earth as a glowing blue sphere, framed by the Orion spacecraft window, with Commander Reid Wiseman and Mission Specialist Christina Koch looking on.

The detail that makes the story even more interesting is how ordinary the device looks in this extraordinary setting. NASA cleared the iPhone 17 Pro Max for extended use in orbit earlier this year, and each Orion crew member has one onboard for personal use. This time, though, the phone was not just for messages or snapshots. It became part of a historic mission.

Metadata shared through Flickr indicates the images were taken on April 2 with the iPhone 17 Pro Max front camera, then processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic. That likely means the final look was shaped with careful adjustments to exposure, contrast, and crop, which is standard practice for mission photography. Still, the fact remains: the raw capture came from a smartphone, and not just any smartphone, but one flying far beyond Earth’s orbit.

No Android phone has ever matched that milestone.

Android devices have certainly made their way into space before, but none have been used on a crewed deep-space mission to photograph Earth in this way. Samsung’s Galaxy S24 space outing in 2024 made headlines, but that experiment involved a high-altitude balloon skimming the edge of the atmosphere. Impressive, yes. The same thing? Not even close.

Artemis II is the first crewed Moon mission NASA has launched since 1972, and it is expected to take humans farther from Earth than anyone has traveled before, before the crew returns on April 10. That alone would make the mission a landmark. The iPhone angle just adds an unexpected twist.

Of course, the spacecraft is carrying serious camera hardware too, including the Nikon D5, Nikon Z 9, and GoPro HERO4 Black. But the fact that a consumer smartphone is sharing the same mission and helping document humanity’s return to the Moon gives this story a very modern edge.

In the end, the message is hard to miss. The iPhone 17 Pro Max is now the first smartphone to travel farther from Earth than any phone before it, and it has the images to prove it. For Apple, it is an unusual but undeniably impressive victory. For Android, it is one more space-age benchmark to chase.

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