It is, and it should be easier. And to be fair to Android, back in the day you could just swap memory cards and copy files over to internal, swap back, put the file back on your memory card. Stuff like that. To be more fair to Android, they can mount to computers as external drives. iPhones never could.

Still, the media players on iOS — those that don't use music.app as player — typically have a web server built in. The player itself will only recognise what it can play, but you could transfer anything using it. Then, with the updated Files app, you can pull it out of that app's folder and put it into another one. Before, I used an app called Documents which had its own storage, plus it could read/write to any cloud storage you connected it to, and it could open/read just about any file, too. Now that app is kinda trash with ads and subscriptions and whatnot, but we got the base functionality in stock.

Everyone talks about the "walled" garden of iOS, and I get it, but for me, those "walls" have always been knee-high at most. I step right over them. And I'm not that smart. Lots of people can do it.