For a few years, modern flagship phones have had comparable specs to mid-tier computers, which gave me a thought: why can't you just run a full-fledged virtual machine on your phone?

The short answer is “because virtual machines don't quite work like that”. The long answer is a bit too complicated for my small brain to properly explain, but the point is that running a virtual machine from your phone isn't really feasible for the average user.

Fortunately, there's another solution: emulation.