Google recently announced a new feature that is rolling out to Android hardware. Find my device. Now of course Apple has had this feature in their devices for a while now and the results have been mixed. It's obviously a very handy tool for finding lost items or a lost phone, particularly in urban environments where there's a lot of devices nearby to ping off of, but one of the biggest downsides to Apple's Find My Network is the fact that it's part of Apple's walled garden. Only Apple devices can participate in the Find My Network for a lost device, and you can really only use Apple's Find My Network on an Apple device. Now there is some limited functionality on Android with Apple's Find My where you can see if an air tag tracker is nearby, but that's really just more of a privacy feature to tell if someone is trying to track you maliciously with an air tag, and it's not the full Find My feature that you get on iOS to track something like a lost iPhone or an air tag. And that's the other downside to Apple's Find My Network, the fact that you have to use their tagging devices if you want to track something like your keys, a toolbox, a laptop bag, etc. The thing about Apple's air tags is they already cost a little bit more than some other tracking devices on the market, but they don't come with any kind of loop for you to easily throw them on a keychain like the other trackers do. So you're almost definitely going to end up spending a few bucks more on a holder case for them, and that really adds up if you're going to buy a bunch of these tracking devices. So you know, that's pretty typical in the Apple world, spending more money on something that has fewer features than the competition, but still the Find My Device Network is something that's really been lacking in the Android ecosystem. Samsung has been developing hardware and software to compete with Apple's Find My Network, but since that's a Samsung development, it didn't really get pushed out to the rest of the Android ecosystem as much. Now, even though Apple has the majority smartphone market share in the United States, therefore there's more Apple devices out there to ping off of, there are still a lot of Android devices out there that AirTags can't communicate with, which makes the lost item harder to find, and this is even more true in countries where iPhones are less common. Heck, even here in the United States, there's some areas where iPhones are just not that common. Plus, if Google's tracking tech is more open than Apple's, then we could start seeing more manufacturers actually get into making those tags to bring the prices down more or to bring in new innovations. Samsung Smart Tags, for example, are already cheaper, better designed arguably, and have a higher ping radius than Apple's AirTags. So Google might end up being some much needed competition for Samsung, because clearly Apple isn't pushing them hard enough in this department. Now, tags that let you track anything that you attach them to are pretty handy, but the first and still most common use for these networks is finding lost smartphones and also finding lost wireless earbuds. Now, there's always been third-party apps that can remotely trigger an alarm on your smartphone, even when the sound is off to help you with finding it. And of course, you could always just call your phone and you could listen for the ring or the vibration. That can be a pretty handy way to find your phone if you lost it in your house. But those solutions don't work if your phone is turned off or if it's in a building or underground someplace where you don't have a signal. So Apple and Google's Find My Networks had to work a little bit differently. They go off of Bluetooth, and just like Apple, Google has made modifications to the batteries and the Bluetooth chips of their latest phones, so that Bluetooth is going to continue working for the Find My Device Tracking for several hours, even after your Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro's battery dies. Now, there's obviously a lot of privacy concerns with this tracking technology, especially when it's coming from a company that makes a lot of money off of tracking people's activities across the internet, even when they tell you that they aren't tracking you. So to ease people's worries, Google has made this blog post telling us how the location data is end-to-end encrypted and the encrypted data is contributed to the Find My Device Network in a manner that does not allow Google to identify the owners of the nearby Android devices that provided the location data, and they also have features to try and reduce malicious tracking like at-home protection, which will prevent your device from contributing crowdsource location reports when you are near a home address that you have saved in your Google account, and by default, the tags won't ping their location to the network unless multiple Android devices detect it, which might happen in a busy place, but not at your home. There's also ways to detect unwanted trackers if someone has slipped one into your bag. There is a bit of an epidemic with creepy people using air tags to stalk people when the air tags first came out, and Google's trackers are also rate-limited to prevent them from constantly pinging your location when you're out in public. So they aren't really useful for that kind of real-time tracking anyway, but despite all of these assurances from Google, the Find My Network is not open source. Google are the ones that ultimately control this network, which is why it's only available in the US and Canada right now instead of places like Mexico or India where Android devices actually do have a market share dominance compared to Apple. Preparatory software interacting with a Bluetooth chip that cannot be turned off and keeps running even after the phone has been turned off is obviously very spooky and not something that I would want to have enabled on my personal phone. But the tracking tags that can ping off of other people's devices are extremely useful, and I really hope either Apple or more likely Google open sources their version of that tech so that it can be integrated into the other's ecosystem and have a universal tag that pings off of both devices. It's always so stupid to me how these iPhone and Android phones took advantage of open standards like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, GPS, I mean without all these technologies what would the smartphone be anyway? And then they build proprietary crap on top of this stuff, these open standards just to lock you in to a specific brand. I mean imagine if this trend continues we might get to the point where you need 5, 10 or more trackers on a single bag just to be able to track it across every device that's out there. That might just become the standard one day in our quickly approaching cyberpunk dystopia. 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