Alienphones: Science Fiction
Nobody knew where they came from, and after the initial shock and suspicion, most people didn't care. A few did, of course, researchers and government and some of the people who lost their shirts when all the stock in cellphones collapsed. There was generally a consensus that it was aliens or something like that, trying to communicate or figure out how to communicate...but they'd clearly put in the receiver backwards or forgotten the code or were trying to talk in a frequency other than ours, so why worry about it? They couldn't communicate through the device, maybe, but we sure could. Some people tried to scare everyone by pointing out that every call would be monitored by aliens, possibly the locations tracked, and who knew what else. Some people stopped using them then, but most people laughed and pointed out that the same thing had been true for at least a decade, and at least the aliens weren't likely to come down and arrest them or put them on a "no fly list," unlike the government. The night show comedians got some pretty good jokes out of the alien no fly list. The government tried to confiscate the phones, and when that didn't work because the darned things practically sprouted out of the ground, they tried a buy-back program. It might have worked better if they'd been willing to pay enough to cover the cost of a top-of-the-line smartphone and a subscription to cover its use for a year. They weren't. People were pissed off enough at their cellphone coverage companies that they didn't care if this new disruptive alien tech made them go out of business--in fact, many of them hoped so. Eventually, even the paranoid used the alien phones, popping out the battery whenever they weren't making a call in hopes that that would disable in GPS tracking in the phones, like it did in human-manufactured cells.
Inspiration: http://www.gocomics.com/speedbump/2013/08/31/
Story potential: Low
Notes: Kind of a detail in some other story, maybe.