Your phone has a different operational workflow than your command line. Yes you're not going to "pipe" it, but on my phone I can open an image in my Photos app,

Your phone has a different operational workflow than your command line. Yes you're not going to "pipe" it, but on my phone I can open an image in my Photos app, click 'share to' and share (open) it either into my Messages app, a file manager app, or an editor, which opens it just fine. Apps can absolutely share data between them. But not in the sense that an output buffer of the program is being injected into another. That really doesn't apply to GUI apps even on your desktop.