Miniaturizing electronics, increase battery, signal processing, improved cameras, ML on phones, voice and command recognition on phones, computational photography, object detection on phones - are just some of the stuff that can be used to improve phones, but are really easy to find military uses for.
...and all those things are developed by literally hundreds of other companies that often interact with Chinese businesses. The US could prohibit export of advanced battery technology or image processing or...
This is not about national security. This is very explicitly a response to Google's desire not to cooperate with the US military on explicitly defense-related research. Two senators literally drew that line for us.
