>>>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.
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>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.
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>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.

Yes, the AirTag is a bluetooth device. But in the past I had to add any bluetooth device (like headphones) to my iPhone bluetooth. Otherwise, it would try to read many devices around me (at the gym or whatever). But this AirTag does not need to be added. At least, for me, this is the first time I came across a bluetooth device that works without adding it.

I am thinking of adding similar bloetooth device to my wife's car (it is an old car) so that I can make and receive phone calls via this device. Unless we get rid of the car all together.

Imagine how many company started since iPhone and/or Android came into being.