Especially if it's BLE. Commercial sites are full of tags that advertise their MACs. Phone app reads this and use it to deduce where you are. You can try something similar yourself with WiFi using Google geolocation API.
Spotify did get worse. It used to have build-in Genius lyrics / trivia display for currently playing song. This feature and recommendation system actually convicted me to pay for it over using youtube as main music player. It is no longer available.
It's just cheaper to design and certificate one part and put it on multiple models than making dedicated analog controls for every new design. Touchscreens are just cost cutting measure. I wonder how many people died fiddling with car radios so one pencil pusher could get a bonus for skimming $10 off manufacturing cost.
That's too bad. I used it a lot to produce epub fitting on my old Sony PRS-300. It couldn't parse pirated epubs with tables of contents, diacritical signs and illustrations, so it was easier to download mobi and convert it in Calibre to epub. It worked nine times out of ten, compared to maybe 10% with epub->epub conversion.