Better question: Is an iPhone less than a tiny PC?
If it weren’t for the crippled OS, their ridiculous power would be more obvious. They’re probably faster than any two-generation old, mid range CPUs and GPUs, as well.
That said, remember iPhone Pro phones cost more than most laptops, and by that same token, have more powerful gpus and cpus than most laptops, too.
Lately, email is virtually not a priority outside of work, and is pretty much just storage for service notifications, online receipts, vendor mail, and poor man’s mfa/password resets. I’ve got these classified decently well, and virtually all of these are read/acknowledged in near real time on my phone.
Human to human comms are now over signal or discord, though admittedly I don’t have a great method to track items needing follow up.
All said, how is thunderbird these days?
The generalized approach in industry is to use API calls, and create classes to structure the data you receive as JSON or XML. At that point, it is entirely up to you how to format and display the data from your classes. Take a look at some of the Lemmy client code like Mlem, Memmy, or Voyager as examples. Though they have gotten more complicated, they all follow this client-server model for front end development.
However, due to recent shenanigans around API and RSS by companies, mostly those looking to prevent AI companies from using their data for free, the alternative, much worse method is to take the HTML output from a standard web request, and try to reverse engineer the page information into a class structure. This sucks, breaks frequently, and requires you to code around ads and other junk on pages in order to get at the content.