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Dropping a phone will result in an immediate change from normal 1g gravity to freefall. Throwing it will involve a brief spike of high-g acceleration in between.

First guess would be that there isn't a deceleration curve when the phone is dropped, like there would be when thrown up.

Good question! I wonder if it can detect friction against air.

I think we need to wait for phones with air pressure sensors.

There have been a few of those already, for at least a decade. IIRC, there was some weather app that crowdsourced readings from users with certain motorola phones and gave shockingly granular weather.