How is he able to help more other than telling the truth that phones and tablets can't do what she needs?

Especially in this department, where limitations are very much fixed. Even if he wants it to work on a phone, he cannot make it do certain things if the OS doesn’t intend it to be possible. If she were trying to do things on Linux, at least you could accuse him of being too lazy to write custom software to do it. Not true on closed platforms though.