>>How about the Pine phones, or any other phone with Linux instead of the proprietary spying OSes on them? I'm still on Symbian exactly for that reason - my Nokia E5 is ten years old - but the number of things which I can't do because I don't have a compatible phone is slowly growing. Nobody here seems to even know that such things exist, and most of the instructional videos that I find are not about removing Android from a phone, but rather about running Linux as an app under Android - which is not the goal.
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>There is something to be said about these new technologies, like OS or Android. I have an iPhone. One of my daughters routinely asks me to take her dog for a day or two (when a worker(s) are coming to her house; the dog is big and people are afraid). I picked her dog yesterday afternoon. And I noticed that whenever I go outside, I get an AirTag notification on my iPhone. The notification tells me that I can find the AirTag and show "it" on the map. This morning I realized that my daughter bought this AirTag and put it on the dog's collar. So, if the dog runs away, she can find her. I never let the dog off leash; so it is probably not necessary for me. But my daughter does leave the dog off leash often; so it makes sense to her.
>What was surprising is that iPhone "sensed" the presence of the AirTag without me installing anything or turning any setting. I read about it now on the AirTag site. I think this is a cool device which probably won't be developed for older technologies.

So it's a bluetooth device and your phone detected it, and probably so would mine if I told it to look for such devices. Now whether they'd find a common protocol is a different matter, I'd guess they probably wouldn't.

I actually found that the previous owner of my new old car has installed some hardware add-on to operate his cell phone hands-free, and I've seen that work during the handover. The car should actually have that out-of-the box, there's even a spoken command interface - and the car is from 2007. Though I doubt it would understand my commands. I do understand a lot of french, but I doubt the French would understand a lot of me :), so I won't even try. But this hands-free add-on sounds interesting... but then I make perhaps a hundred calls a year, and drive less than 10000 km a year, so why bother.