I'm not sure about that. DxO rates Sony's very highly, and they're by far the most objective of all the camera ratings.
Sony gets a lot of hate online from people comparing full-resolution pictures at 100%. Sony has been using 23MP/25MP sensors in their own phones for a while, but in auto mode images are supersampled to 8MP. In manual mode you can use the full resolution. People always compare the full 25MP pictures at 100% to full 12MP pictures from other devices at 100%. And at that point, they will indeed look a bit less good and less detailed. At Sony's default 8MP things actually do look great. And their camera apps are pretty good too.
For me (the owner of both a Z3C and Z5C) the photos don't even come close to the quality of an iPhone. I don't have any objective measure for that, just my own experience - I will always use an iPhone if I can.
Perhaps just as importantly, it takes at least four seconds for the camera app to activate and be ready to take a photo. Simply put, the software is awful.
I used to have a Sony Xperia Z3C and I feel like the photos were acceptable for me. The bigger issue to me was that the cameras were significantly slower than the iPhone camera. I suppose this is only an issue depending on what you're taking but I mainly only take pictures of my cats who never stay in one position for long.
Sony gets a lot of hate online from people comparing full-resolution pictures at 100%. Sony has been using 23MP/25MP sensors in their own phones for a while, but in auto mode images are supersampled to 8MP. In manual mode you can use the full resolution. People always compare the full 25MP pictures at 100% to full 12MP pictures from other devices at 100%. And at that point, they will indeed look a bit less good and less detailed. At Sony's default 8MP things actually do look great. And their camera apps are pretty good too.