Well it's a finger-sized antenna. Admittedly all I know about antennas is that size matters. An Iphone is bigger than a finger, why is it inconceivable that it could have a comparable antenna on its surface?
Also for an Iphone this would be just one rarely-used feature, it could get by with somewhat worse reception and lower bandwidth than a dedicated satellite phone.
Mobile phones used to have antennas like this in the early 2000s, and now they don‘t anymore. I don‘t know that much about antenna design, but I‘d suspect that there might be a similar opportunity here?
