With airtags on iPhones and smart tags for Android becoming common now for tracking objects I don’t understand why they need to be attached to electronics.
Why can’t I track my headphones, smart watch and other Bluetooth things through the same tracking apps?
In: Technology
Money.
There are some programmatic issues in headphones, they weren’t built to chirp their Bluetooth mac continuously over time. But if they did, any Bluetooth receiver capable of picking up that packet and version of Bluetooth would be able to identify the mac.
The problem is tracking a generic Bluetooth device isn’t possible in iOS and got more difficult in android a few years ago. There are apps out there that will track any Bluetooth device on android, but you’ll have to go back to at least android 6 and possibly android 4 to get that functionality. Great for finding any Bluetooth device based on received signal strength.
Now the Bluetooth apps look for specific groups of macs that define the tags. The tags chirp a mac and maybe some magic numbers or data. If you aren’t using the right grouping for the mac, the app won’t read it. Is there any real world difference between a tile, cube, an apple airtag or that generic cheap thing on Amazon… Not really.
But with a selected group of macs going in software and ignoring the rest, now you have to use those tags and their app. In the case of apple, their phone.
Bluetooth is very simple at a point. Sensing a mac and looking for that specifically is easy. Then your app helps you deal with the signal strength. If you share a tag as “missing” that mac gets pushed to the cloud and other users of the app might look for it too. If they choose to share location data, finding it is pretty easy.
It’s about money. You buy into an ecosystem and work within that ecosystem. The tags cost about two bucks, no matter what they’re charging you. Build us an open source alternative with a specific hardware spec?
Latest Answers