As a chronic loser of keys and wallets, I recognize the user need here. However, this is a prime example of a piece of software that can only be trusted when an open-source implementation is provided.
Google and their customers don't have much to gain through a proprietary implementation. If anything, open-sourcing Find My Device Network would allow third party devices to join the network, enhancing its value to Google's customers. Google emphasizes ad nauseum that this system is extremely private and secure, so third party implementations shouldn't be cause for worry.
Governments and various potentially dangerous organizations stand to benefit greatly from a closed implementation for reasons that hardly need explaining.
Google makes a lot of lofty claims about E2EE and privacy considerations in that blog post, I'd just like to see them prove it.
Beside of open-source, this whole use-case should be built as an industry standard, not as a ammunition for an adjacent platform war.
With these few huge tech-companies, the industry has lost its natural "feature" that required competing players to work together and form an Alliance/SIG to make really big things happen.
Instead, the really big companies are happy to take the fruits from that time (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC,...) and build something proprietary on top instead of contributing back to it...
I love my Tile(s), but since the AirTag and now Android networks now feature the same capability, I feel their model is dead in the water since they don't own the platform and can't compete on the installed base.
They should have sold out (edit: to a mobile platform company, either Google or Apple) while they had the chance.
They did sell out, they were acquired by Life360 a while ago.
edit: I don't think Google would have had much to gain by acquiring Tile, the actual technology is very simple, their moat was just the fact that they had the largest install base of tracking apps on Android. Google could, and did, just rug-pull them by pushing their own network out to every Android device with Play Services (so nearly all of them).
The only thing Tile really has going for it now is that their trackers can be used with both Android and iOS simultaneously, if you have devices in both ecosystems.
As someone who owns about eight of them, I don't see how you could love Tile. They have a ridiculous profit margin and the company likes to engage in asshole practices like making it so getting a notification when you lose connection with a tile is a fucking monthly subscription. Companies that charge for things which cost them literally zero dollars deserve to burn to the ground.
99.9% of the time the network doesn’t matter because the item isn’t lost, I just don’t remember where I left it, and it’s either in range or wherever Tile shows the last known location to be. And even if it is lost, Tile app remembers it as being at the last place where I had it and my phone, which is practically always where I left it.
Airtag surely has better coverage, since like 50% of phones are helping, but the one time I actually lost something Tile found it. Someone had moved it so the location must have been uploaded by another Tile user. I use my Tiles daily to find my AirPods or a key set, I’ve used it once in years to find that (my Airpods case) when it fell out of my pocket in a park.
Tile is louder and easier to hear. Tile has several form factors, Airtag only has one, and honestly, any tile form factor is better than Airtags. I swear they picked the worst possible shape for it, it just has to make whatever you put it in bulge. You have to buy some sort of case to even use it most of the time, whereas a Tile can pop directly onto your key ring.
Airtag can’t ring my phone. I do that frequently.
I’ve used both extensively, I’ll keep buying Tiles. Or maybe one of these newer ones. I’d go so far as to say Airtag is only better at finding something that’s been stolen, and that’s just a tiny percent of the use cases. Tile is better in every other way.
AirTags are not better in one very important way: they don't prevent theft. They will notify thieves that they are hidden in a valuable item that they are stealing if the thief carries an iPhone.
Tile has a feature where you can submit your info and sign some sort of extra contract stating that you won't use your Tile for stalking/illegal activity, and you can actually hide a Tile in your bike frame and it can be used to find your bike if it goes missing. AirTags are useless for this because Apple doesn't want them used for stalking.
one way they aren't better. You have the tile but can't find your damn phone. Sure there is 'find my' but the little button on the tile that causes the phone to chime was actually pretty handy.
I imagine apple removed it because tags are not paired to phones (like tiles) but instead to the whole account. If you were to push the theoretical button on the airtag your entire house would probably set to chiming (apple tv, homepod, all the phones and ipads on the account all the macs...)
AirTags only come in a single size and shape that only makes sense for larger container objects. Tile makes a flat credit-card sized variant that you can slide in your wallet, and the adapters required to put an AirTag on a keychain is pretty ridiculous in comparison to the tiny variants you can get from Tile with a built-in hole for this purpose.
(Also: AFAIK the "large"--not really, in comparison to the AirTag + adapter, lol--Tile Pro variants have a noticeably longer range than AirTags.) Honestly, the only thing, to me, missing from Tile is the direction arrow finder, which is certainly useful, and yet... the speakers on the Tile are much much better so it just doesn't matter so much?
(BTW: it is extremely stupid that that arrow only works in two directions. I waste so much time following the arrow only to realize I need to go upstairs -- I live in a two story apartment with a bedroom and an office above my kitchen and living room: it isn't larger than my friends's apartments, but it is really nice having two floors -- that I am only doing because the sound isn't loud enough on AirTags.)
Frankly, the whole argument for AirTags being inherently better is merely that they have a "bigger network", but for most of my objects I am not scavenging around town looking for then, nor am I ever going to be chasing some thief around the city in my car looking to steal it back, hoping to catch up to them before they disable or throw out the tracker... that vigilante justice idea associated with this product category is just a crazy pipe dream.
Instead, I am pretty much always just trying to figure out which pair of pants I left my wallet in today, or on which shelf I left my keys: I would actually be much happier with a purely local product that only responded to encrypted pings from my personal phone and only even did that when I actively ask it to (as despite using both Tile and AirTags for years now the "you left your item behind" notifications have only happened before I myself noticed once or twice in a way which was helpful... it just doesn't ping often enough, with either product, to be maximally useful).
And looking at the replies to this, I have learned AirTags are actually missing what is to me a glorious feature of Tile: that I can push a button on my keys and find my phone in reverse. I hadn't noticed this lack before as I am only using AirTags in large objects I don't keep on my person (which makes their notifications really annoying as the UI fails to eat old ones even when I walk back to my object... this seems very fixable), but I don't want to have to buy an Apple Watch just to have a way to find my phone :/.
I had a number of Tiles over the years and really wanted to like them, but really didn't. I lose stuff infrequently enough that the battery in the tiles would die 2-10 times before I was likely to lose my keys/wallet. The TV remote, the tile was something my son (the primary loser) would fiddle with constantly and destroy. I carried a dead Tile Pro on my keys probably 95% of the time I carried it.
The one place I'd really like a tile is on my Pixel Buds, but a Tile is a significant %age of the size of the case, and again not something I need super frequently.
Do the Pixel Buds not have a Find feature? I have the same experience as you with Tile, but I use the "Find" feature on my iPhone to locate my AirPods all the time.
> I feel their model is dead in the water since they don't own the platform and can't compete on the installed base.
Yeah, this functionality is the ultimate "network effect" model. While my most common use case for Tile is walking around my house with my phone to see where I've misplaced my keys, the other (and more advertised) case is that if I lose my keys while out and about, I can get notified of their location if anyone else with the Tile app installed is near my keys.
The iOS and Android platforms have a huge advantage because they don't depend on having any app installed - that previous sentence just becomes "I can get notified of their location if anyone else with an iOS device (for AirTags) or Android device (for this new functionality) is near my keys." That's huge, because it means there are fewer places that won't have anyone with those phones. And now that Android has this functionality, I see more and more people switching to it from Tile, which means the Tile network will get smaller and be even less useful for the Tile users who remain.
> if anyone else with an iOS device (for AirTags) or Android device (for this new functionality) is near my keys.
I wonder just how quickly this'll roll out over the Android devices in the wild? It needs Android 9+ it seems, which is about 80-85% of the devices from memory. I wonder if it also needs vendor updates? How quickly will Samsung/Huawei et al provide Android updates with this feature? (And will vendors be able to choose to block it?)
Yeah I can't really see where they go from here, which is a big shame personally because I got a bunch of very cheap battery replaceable ones years back that are still going strong.
Also got a four pack of long dead gen 2s that were pretty easy to cut apart, rejig for replaceable batteries and embed into a few items.
No, the AirTag ecosystem and Google Find My ecosystem are still separate things. Google and Apple did cooperate to standardize stalker detection though, so your iPhone will alert you if you have an unknown Google tag following you, or vice versa if your Android phone notices an unknown AirTag.
Is there a technical reason why this can't work with Apple's Find My network, or is it just that they don't want to work together? Using the "Unknown Trackers" feature my Samsung phone can scan for nearby AirTags and tell them to play sounds.
Not anymore, since 2022 apple stock was mostly flat and today is even below January 2022. Vision Pro is a flop as today (maybe future iteration will change that) - just look at google trends.
Hopefully Apple change the course or Tim Cook get replaced - especially if they don't show anything meaningful related to AI/ML at this WWDC.
If we were to force all new technologies to be interoperable with all technologies from all possible competitors we’d create a Kafkaesque nightmare for innovators and particularly early stage startups.
It’s actually two separate aspects, there’s the network for crowdsourced finding, and there’s the localisation of unwanted trackers.
The feature that lets you ring nearby trackers is actually standardised between Apple, Google, Samsung and the others. It goes by DULT - Detection of Unwanted Location Trackers.
Of course it isn't. The time of interoperable standards in consumer devices is long past.
Bluetooth used to support file transfers from device to device on feature- and early smartphones no matter the brand; now there's AirDrop (and maybe sometimes Google Nearby, but only if the humidity and lunar phase is just right).
In home audio streaming, there was once DLNA; now there's AirPlay and Google Cast.
We have two mutually incompatible walled gardens, and while life within them is admittedly nicer than in a world of poorly-implemented standards, the walls are getting higher by the day.
Good call out, it’s incredible we went from local file transfers with Bluetooth to needing an internet connection to transfer to a person sitting next to you just because they have a different OS. If only the EU could pressure the big folks to adopt one wireless transfer protocol like it did USB C recently with Apple.
Bluetooth file transfer was always nearly useless in my experience, airdrop was somewhat revolutionary in that it actually worked reliably most of the time
Oh sure, it would be a great opportunity, but the idea of Apple voluntarily interoperating with anyone else on most things is just funny to think about.
Google isn't significantly better on that metric, of course, but I feel like it's often in Google's business interests to interoperate more often than it is in Apple's.
I don't know the answer but I agree this tech should be standardized. Over time there will be a massive network of phones and tags capable of finding each other, but it's silly to bifurcate it such that you might not find your device because nobody on the "correct" network is nearby.
Couldn't agree more – just like it's quite silly to not be able to "AirDrop" a photo to an Android device, even though Bluetooth could do it just fine 20 years ago from a Nokia to an Ericsson or Motorola.
I’m really surprised this took 3 years after AirTags. Especially since AirTags have been rumored to launch for a very long time before that, and it was a surprise to people that they seemed to be done and just not available (IIRC).
Google decided to delay the release until apple updated their unknown tracker alert to support google's bluetooth tracking devices. Not sure why, but it took one year for apple to implement the support.
Does anyone have a comparison of Airtag vs "Bluetooth tracker tags from Chipolo and Pebblebee"? I imagine Airtag is superior due to non-reliance on Bluetooth? Can Chipolo/Pebblebee tap into the Android network without Bluetooth? And is their tech comparable to Apple's work?
In addition to BLE, AirTags use UWB. I assume this is how AirTags can provide fairly high-fidelity directional guidance, something that wasn't clear the new set of Android tags provide.
I can't really see how Airtag can be superior in most places around the world: it's simple, there are many more Android users than iPhone users so the Google network can only be better (if not right now, then over time, give it 12 months...?)
This difference is even stronger when you leave EU + US and go to Asia, Central / South America, Africa where iPhone users are not less, but very rare.
My use case is clearly to track my hand luggage, wallet, backpack etc. when I travel and I'm a nomad. Gonna wait on reviews but I'm very excited!
"Out of battery" isn't really what we think it means. The phone shuts down (and refuses to start back up) when it still has quite a bit of battery left. If it truly allowed the battery to go flat, that would damage the battery, and you'd have a really hard time charging it again.
The amount of juice your entire phone needs to run for, say, a half hour can probably power just the bluetooth LE chipset for occasional wakeups for beacon-sending for... weeks? Months? (Completely made up time spans, but the BTLE chipset really does need a tiny amount of power for infrequent wakesups compared to the entire phone.) Certainly this can't last forever: if your phone is missing for long enough, the battery will eventually run down to a point where the battery controller won't let even the BTLE chipset draw any more power.
This definitely requires hardware, firmware, and software support in order to set up, which is why only Pixel 8 is supported so far. Clearly when they were designing the Pixel 8 hardware, they already knew this feature was in the pipeline, and wanted to be able to launch with a supported phone.
As far as I remember there's a separate microcontroller that controls "Find my phone" beacons without having to boot up iOS on the main application processor.
The CR2032 that AirTags run on for over a year has about 200mAhr of capacity. That's down under 5% of a typical 5000mAhr phone battery. So 1% of the contingency low battery capacity could probably run the BLE stuff for a few months if needed.
I'm guessing this works exactly the same way as Apple's "Findable After Power Off" feature [1]. If the phone "dies" the battery still has some reserve to display the "charging needed" screen when the power button is pushed, along with sending location. Additionally, it can use the Find My network [2] where other devices that are powered on can relay the proximity device's location using their own location.
Same question here. I have to assume this would either work by the device sending out a last gasp "I'm about to die" GPS location call home (for finding it when it's far away), or else there's a mostly passive RFID-like thing in the phone that makes it findable by nearby devices (for finding it when it's somewhere in the house/car/office with you).
I read that they use bluetooth beaconing for this. A simple bluetooth beacon like a tile can run for months with minimal power. The phone isn't actually 'dead dead' it's still powering the bluetooth beacon.
> thanks to specialized Pixel hardware, Pixel 8 and 8 Pro owners will also be able to find their devices if they’re powered off or the battery is dead.
This suggests there is separate hardware with its own power and network capabilities, designed for location tracking, designed to be always on. Is there a way to disable it?
> To solve this problem, Google is working on a “Powered Off Finding” feature that allows a device to store precomputed Bluetooth beacons in the memory of the Bluetooth controller. This means that even when a device is powered off, it can continue broadcasting Bluetooth beacons to nearby devices.
> Unfortunately, Powered Off Finding isn’t the kind of feature that can just be enabled on any device. This is because the device needs to have hardware support for powering the Bluetooth controller when the rest of the components are shut down. Plus, device makers need to put in some extra engineering work to support this feature. For example, they need to support the Bluetooth Finder hardware abstraction layer (HAL) so that the Android OS can enable Powered Off Finding mode and send those precomputed Bluetooth beacons that I mentioned.
I don't know how that could work if the battery is dead, unless they're letting the Bluetooth controller draw on some reserve battery capacity after the phone has powered itself down.
Putting my tinfoil hat on, this explains why Google was okay adding a toggle to location access for apps on Android. They don't need your device to send them their location anymore, they'd only need you to be in range of an UWB or BLE device.
iOS-style runtime permissions (for things like location access) were introduced in Android 6.0, which was released back in 2015. That's quite the long play.
I've measured with an external, unconnected RF monitor. The cell phone shows clear activity when not in airplane mode, and then zero activity when in airplane mode.
Readit News
Google and their customers don't have much to gain through a proprietary implementation. If anything, open-sourcing Find My Device Network would allow third party devices to join the network, enhancing its value to Google's customers. Google emphasizes ad nauseum that this system is extremely private and secure, so third party implementations shouldn't be cause for worry.
Governments and various potentially dangerous organizations stand to benefit greatly from a closed implementation for reasons that hardly need explaining.
Google makes a lot of lofty claims about E2EE and privacy considerations in that blog post, I'd just like to see them prove it.
With these few huge tech-companies, the industry has lost its natural "feature" that required competing players to work together and form an Alliance/SIG to make really big things happen.
Instead, the really big companies are happy to take the fruits from that time (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC,...) and build something proprietary on top instead of contributing back to it...
They don't need google for that. It's built right into the phone network.
Try FMD. https://f-droid.org/packages/de.nulide.findmydevice/
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...
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They should have sold out (edit: to a mobile platform company, either Google or Apple) while they had the chance.
edit: I don't think Google would have had much to gain by acquiring Tile, the actual technology is very simple, their moat was just the fact that they had the largest install base of tracking apps on Android. Google could, and did, just rug-pull them by pushing their own network out to every Android device with Play Services (so nearly all of them).
The only thing Tile really has going for it now is that their trackers can be used with both Android and iOS simultaneously, if you have devices in both ecosystems.
99.9% of the time the network doesn’t matter because the item isn’t lost, I just don’t remember where I left it, and it’s either in range or wherever Tile shows the last known location to be. And even if it is lost, Tile app remembers it as being at the last place where I had it and my phone, which is practically always where I left it.
Airtag surely has better coverage, since like 50% of phones are helping, but the one time I actually lost something Tile found it. Someone had moved it so the location must have been uploaded by another Tile user. I use my Tiles daily to find my AirPods or a key set, I’ve used it once in years to find that (my Airpods case) when it fell out of my pocket in a park.
Tile is louder and easier to hear. Tile has several form factors, Airtag only has one, and honestly, any tile form factor is better than Airtags. I swear they picked the worst possible shape for it, it just has to make whatever you put it in bulge. You have to buy some sort of case to even use it most of the time, whereas a Tile can pop directly onto your key ring.
Airtag can’t ring my phone. I do that frequently.
I’ve used both extensively, I’ll keep buying Tiles. Or maybe one of these newer ones. I’d go so far as to say Airtag is only better at finding something that’s been stolen, and that’s just a tiny percent of the use cases. Tile is better in every other way.
Tile has a feature where you can submit your info and sign some sort of extra contract stating that you won't use your Tile for stalking/illegal activity, and you can actually hide a Tile in your bike frame and it can be used to find your bike if it goes missing. AirTags are useless for this because Apple doesn't want them used for stalking.
I imagine apple removed it because tags are not paired to phones (like tiles) but instead to the whole account. If you were to push the theoretical button on the airtag your entire house would probably set to chiming (apple tv, homepod, all the phones and ipads on the account all the macs...)
(Also: AFAIK the "large"--not really, in comparison to the AirTag + adapter, lol--Tile Pro variants have a noticeably longer range than AirTags.) Honestly, the only thing, to me, missing from Tile is the direction arrow finder, which is certainly useful, and yet... the speakers on the Tile are much much better so it just doesn't matter so much?
(BTW: it is extremely stupid that that arrow only works in two directions. I waste so much time following the arrow only to realize I need to go upstairs -- I live in a two story apartment with a bedroom and an office above my kitchen and living room: it isn't larger than my friends's apartments, but it is really nice having two floors -- that I am only doing because the sound isn't loud enough on AirTags.)
Frankly, the whole argument for AirTags being inherently better is merely that they have a "bigger network", but for most of my objects I am not scavenging around town looking for then, nor am I ever going to be chasing some thief around the city in my car looking to steal it back, hoping to catch up to them before they disable or throw out the tracker... that vigilante justice idea associated with this product category is just a crazy pipe dream.
Instead, I am pretty much always just trying to figure out which pair of pants I left my wallet in today, or on which shelf I left my keys: I would actually be much happier with a purely local product that only responded to encrypted pings from my personal phone and only even did that when I actively ask it to (as despite using both Tile and AirTags for years now the "you left your item behind" notifications have only happened before I myself noticed once or twice in a way which was helpful... it just doesn't ping often enough, with either product, to be maximally useful).
And looking at the replies to this, I have learned AirTags are actually missing what is to me a glorious feature of Tile: that I can push a button on my keys and find my phone in reverse. I hadn't noticed this lack before as I am only using AirTags in large objects I don't keep on my person (which makes their notifications really annoying as the UI fails to eat old ones even when I walk back to my object... this seems very fixable), but I don't want to have to buy an Apple Watch just to have a way to find my phone :/.
The one place I'd really like a tile is on my Pixel Buds, but a Tile is a significant %age of the size of the case, and again not something I need super frequently.
Yeah, this functionality is the ultimate "network effect" model. While my most common use case for Tile is walking around my house with my phone to see where I've misplaced my keys, the other (and more advertised) case is that if I lose my keys while out and about, I can get notified of their location if anyone else with the Tile app installed is near my keys.
The iOS and Android platforms have a huge advantage because they don't depend on having any app installed - that previous sentence just becomes "I can get notified of their location if anyone else with an iOS device (for AirTags) or Android device (for this new functionality) is near my keys." That's huge, because it means there are fewer places that won't have anyone with those phones. And now that Android has this functionality, I see more and more people switching to it from Tile, which means the Tile network will get smaller and be even less useful for the Tile users who remain.
I wonder just how quickly this'll roll out over the Android devices in the wild? It needs Android 9+ it seems, which is about 80-85% of the devices from memory. I wonder if it also needs vendor updates? How quickly will Samsung/Huawei et al provide Android updates with this feature? (And will vendors be able to choose to block it?)
Glad I decided to buy only one to test it out rather than go all-in.
The Apple value prop used to be “it all works together”, now it’s “half the shit you spent thousands on won’t work if you leave the island”.
The Tim Cook era is great for stock holders, but he’s one of the prime enshittifiers in Silicon Valley.
Not anymore, since 2022 apple stock was mostly flat and today is even below January 2022. Vision Pro is a flop as today (maybe future iteration will change that) - just look at google trends.
Hopefully Apple change the course or Tim Cook get replaced - especially if they don't show anything meaningful related to AI/ML at this WWDC.
The feature that lets you ring nearby trackers is actually standardised between Apple, Google, Samsung and the others. It goes by DULT - Detection of Unwanted Location Trackers.
The crowdsource networks are not compatible.
Bluetooth used to support file transfers from device to device on feature- and early smartphones no matter the brand; now there's AirDrop (and maybe sometimes Google Nearby, but only if the humidity and lunar phase is just right).
In home audio streaming, there was once DLNA; now there's AirPlay and Google Cast.
We have two mutually incompatible walled gardens, and while life within them is admittedly nicer than in a world of poorly-implemented standards, the walls are getting higher by the day.
Google isn't significantly better on that metric, of course, but I feel like it's often in Google's business interests to interoperate more often than it is in Apple's.
That still leaves 2 years past Apple’s long rumored debut.
This difference is even stronger when you leave EU + US and go to Asia, Central / South America, Africa where iPhone users are not less, but very rare.
My use case is clearly to track my hand luggage, wallet, backpack etc. when I travel and I'm a nomad. Gonna wait on reviews but I'm very excited!
The amount of juice your entire phone needs to run for, say, a half hour can probably power just the bluetooth LE chipset for occasional wakeups for beacon-sending for... weeks? Months? (Completely made up time spans, but the BTLE chipset really does need a tiny amount of power for infrequent wakesups compared to the entire phone.) Certainly this can't last forever: if your phone is missing for long enough, the battery will eventually run down to a point where the battery controller won't let even the BTLE chipset draw any more power.
This definitely requires hardware, firmware, and software support in order to set up, which is why only Pixel 8 is supported so far. Clearly when they were designing the Pixel 8 hardware, they already knew this feature was in the pipeline, and wanted to be able to launch with a supported phone.
As far as I remember there's a separate microcontroller that controls "Find my phone" beacons without having to boot up iOS on the main application processor.
1. https://www.theverge.com/22697218/iphone-apple-ios-15-find-m... 2. https://developer.apple.com/find-my/
This suggests there is separate hardware with its own power and network capabilities, designed for location tracking, designed to be always on. Is there a way to disable it?
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/11520-android-find-my-devic...
https://www.androidpolice.com/android-15-powered-off-finding...:
> To solve this problem, Google is working on a “Powered Off Finding” feature that allows a device to store precomputed Bluetooth beacons in the memory of the Bluetooth controller. This means that even when a device is powered off, it can continue broadcasting Bluetooth beacons to nearby devices.
> Unfortunately, Powered Off Finding isn’t the kind of feature that can just be enabled on any device. This is because the device needs to have hardware support for powering the Bluetooth controller when the rest of the components are shut down. Plus, device makers need to put in some extra engineering work to support this feature. For example, they need to support the Bluetooth Finder hardware abstraction layer (HAL) so that the Android OS can enable Powered Off Finding mode and send those precomputed Bluetooth beacons that I mentioned.
I don't know how that could work if the battery is dead, unless they're letting the Bluetooth controller draw on some reserve battery capacity after the phone has powered itself down.
Google owns the OS; if they want your location, they don't need to care about per-app location permissions.
There's my anecdata...
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