Their capabilities are somewhat the same. With spyware, you have applications that are surreptitiously installed on people's phones in order to spy on them in real time. Mobile forensic devices give you the ability to access the same granularity of data after the fact, so they're not the same thing at all, but they essentially provide the same access to data that you would not have otherwise without having to get a warrant, to the degree that you would need to get a warrant to access each connection to a cloud service provider, for instance.
On February 15th, 2024. See this statement in context.