dangus said:
I looked at this website for recommendations
http://www.electricvehiclewiki.com/wiki/leaf-spy-pro/
I bought four different ones on that list, one for my old iphone5 and three for my Android phone using Lollipop. All of them connected to my phone, and all of them either did not find the Leaf or almost connected but came back with errors and finally did not connect.
Can you be more specific which models?
The author recommends LELink for iOS which is Bluetooth LE. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/DeviceInformation/Reference/iOSDeviceCompatibility/DeviceCompatibilityMatrix/DeviceCompatibilityMatrix.html says iPhone 5 has Bluetooth LE support. However, AFAIK, there's only the paid Pro version for iOS.
If the dongles you bought had Bluetooth support only and NOT Bluetooth LE, then NONE of them would've worked w/the iOS version of the app. For iOS, if for some reason you don't wish to use LELink and you want to use another Bluetooth LE dongle, see the list at http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=470115#p470115.
You probably discovered you can use the free Lite version on Android to at least test that your setup works. You do have the car powered up in READY mode (green car with arrows), right? What if you open a door or press the brake pedal when it's trying to connect?
Lollipop is pretty old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history. What model of phone do you have? I use a Pixel 3 that's on Pie. That said, I started with Leaf Spy on the Verizon Samsung Galaxy S4, then Verizon Samsung Galaxy S6 then a Nexus 5x and now a Pixel 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S4 says they only went up to Lollipop on that phone, officially.
I only ever bought the 2 dongles I pointed you to. Both of them worked.
There is work-in-progress (stalled?) Happy Leaf at http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=23561. I've never tried it. Maybe skim the topics at http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewforum.php?f=44 to see if there are others.
Before Leaf Spy existed, people built stuff like the original gid meters (https://saxton.org/tom_saxton/2012/01/leaf-soc-meter-build.html), LeafDD (http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?t=12561) and the author of Leaf Spy built WattsLeft (http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=8527). That's when I first had gone to his house (he lives a few miles from me). Gid meters were needed for the Phoenix range tests: https://web.archive.org/web/20160113132627/http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=228326. I loaned some equipment to surfingslovak (at Turbo3's house) for use during the range tests. He flew over to Phoenix w/my equipment and some gid meters.
For WattsLeft, Turbo3 had to do everything in assembly language and he mentions this about the chip he was using: "The SX28AC is a very basic single chip system with 2K words (12 bits) of EEPROM program storage, 136 bytes of RAM all inside a 28 pin package with 20 general purpose I/O pins."