> the APP3 are what forced the upgrade to iOS 26

I resisted, did not upgrade, and I have to suffer through Apple's spiteful treatment of my AirPods as "just another Bluetooth device". You can't even see the battery status, the battery widget will show three headphones (!). I find their attitude annoying and disturbing. There was no reason to degrade the experience.

In case anyone says "but new iOS is required to make use of the fancy new features/protocols/whatever" — that is not true for functionality that existed in AirPods 2. I know, because they didn't have the time to break things on the Mac, so my Airpods 3 work exactly the same on the Mac as Airpods 2 did: they show battery status as expected.