system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why smartphones can't capture decent pictures of the moon/stars.
gpt
There are two main characteristics of a camera. How much light it collects, and for how long. In mechanical cameras, these are aperture size and shutter speed, respectively. Smartphone cameras do not have a shutter, but likely have something analogous.

When the cameras are designed and manufactured, the engineers have to decide on a blend between ease of use and versatility. Your average person isn't going to want dozens of settings. They just want something they can point at an object and take a picture. They also are unlikely to have a background in photography, so even if those settings were there, they wouldn't really be able to take advantage of them.

So the designers basically make a camera that will do fine under most normal situations, but taking pictures in extremes of light are mostly outside the realm of what these cameras are able to handle. It's a trade off between cost and expected use.