The iPhone camera is tuned for realistic color unless you've left the style setting on Vibrant. I guess it doesn't have an "even less vibrant" style.
It does have higher than real contrast, but that's because images are 8-bit - if you don't try to fill the range, it's going to look low quality with banding artifacts.
Yeah, it exposes people in the foreground differently than the rest of the picture. That's still trying to fit them into 8-bit - basically it's trying to avoid the "black people don't activate soap dispensers" effect where dark skin isn't visible in a dark picture. (Also, if the user is only looking at a face in the picture, or if the face has a different lighting source than the rest of it, then it makes sense to calculate its exposure separately too.)
Larger cameras don't do that specific one as much ("dynamic range optimizer" or HDR programs do some of it), but they do care about skin in white balance and autofocus, and then photographers care when they're setting up flashes.
It does have higher than real contrast, but that's because images are 8-bit - if you don't try to fill the range, it's going to look low quality with banding artifacts.