In truth, I use a USB-C/Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter. It lives on the car's aux cord.

does someone sell one of these that survives more than 10 disconnect cycles now?

No. I buy a new handful every couple months. It sucks. My latest batch is from some brand called Insignia and so far has lasted one month without issues, but I'll be surprised if they don't fail soon. Previously tried Apple and Anker, both failed in a small number of months.

I've considered wrapping the thing in heat-shrink tubing to give it some rigidity and protect the nano-scale-wires they're using in there, but haven't got any handy.

I'd love a phone with a real jack, but phones just aren't made for me anymore.

Just buy a cheap phone with an audio jack and use that one dedicated for the car. No need for the latest greatest for playing music on the go...

Now you've introduced either a caching problem or a data subscription with a myriad of other trade-offs and I don't think either of those are less trouble than bluetooth.

Ah, forgot about the new way of not owning your music but renting it. I'm still a bit old fashioned and prefer to own my music so the artist can't just take it away when they feel like it.

> some brand called Insignia

Isn't that just Best Buy's store brand?

I've been happy with my Ugreen 3.5mm+charge adapter for about six months now. It looks rather dumb but works perfectly.

You can always use a lightning/usb-c to 3.5mm cable.

I'm using a 200 eur Xiaomi Redmi with a 3.5mm jack and I'm very happy with it. Battery lasts me around 5 days. Why is it garbage?