[Cupertino95014]

MP3 is indeed universal, and iTunes doesn't support FLAC. However, on my Mac there are any number of third party players that do (e.g. I have Elmedia Player at the moment), and on the Android almost every music player app supports FLAC.

I don't know about an iPhone. I assume you can find apps that support it.

[joecool1029]

I actually went digging for a bit on information about audio codecs being decoded in Qualcomm's hexagon DSP. I'm no expert but it seems like recent generations of the platform (anything post-2013 or so) don't bother with hardware decoding for audio codecs (except for in voice calling with AMR and EVS). It appears to be all software codecs for many generations now. Makes sense as even the efficiency cores on modern mobile devices are way overkill for audio.