iOS versus Android for deepfake detection is not really a platform war. It is a question about hardware, app stores, and privacy defaults. The answer is less dramatic than the fans want.
Start with hardware, because it decides what developers can even build. iPhones are a short list of powerful, uniform devices, which makes on-device analysis easier to build and test. Android is thousands of devices from budget to flagship, so developers either target the high end or push analysis to the cloud. A deepfake scanner app on iOS and Android can share a brand and be a different product underneath. Check which one you are actually getting.
Privacy defaults differ too. iOS photo permissions are granular, and App Store review, imperfect as it is, filters some junk. The Play Store has historically let more sketchy scanners through. Neither store is a guarantee. Both deserve the same skepticism. I have seen garbage on both.
The quality gap is real but narrowing. iOS had the only halfway-decent options a couple of years ago. Now there are credible Android contenders, though the long tail of sketchy Android scanners is still longer. The one-star reviews tell the same story everywhere: false positives, vague verdicts, aggressive upsells.
Cloud versus on-device is the decision that actually matters, more than the logo on your phone. On-device keeps your media private and works offline, but it is limited by hardware and model size. Cloud can run the serious models but uploads your files. Pick based on what you are scanning, not which phone you own. This is the paragraph to reread.
Also check the update history. Detection models go stale as generators improve. An app untouched for a year is a museum piece, whatever the platform. This applies to any deepfake detector app you rely on, and doubly to any real-time deepfake detector app download promising live analysis. Stale plus real-time is a bad combination.
Honestly, the platform matters less than the vendor behind the app. A serious detection company ships decent apps on both. A sketchy one ships junk on both. And whichever side you are on, a mobile app to detect deepfake video is triage until a reviewed tool or a human confirms it.
For the detection technology behind the mobile options, with vendors evaluated on equal footing, the database at deepfakedetect.fyi beats scrolling either app store.