Yes you should! Most of the time there is open source software available for what you need, and most often it is better than any proprietary version. I’m certain there is some ocr software available, and something on my system has it because I keep updating “tesseract” which is an open source OCR package.
Possible alternative for Whatsapp is to run matrix and a WhatsApp bridge, then all of your messages will be stored in the WhatsApp bridge, and you can access them via a matrix client. Pretty long winded though. As for Android auto, I can’t afford a fancy new car with a screen in it so I just mount my phone on the dashboard and use it like that with no Android auto.
Strikes me that there should be some kind of provisioning tool similar to Ansible for Android devices, what does industry do when they need to automate provisioning of thousands of devices for POS, retail, barcode scanning, delivery drivers, etc.