Yesterday, Apple announced that its Find My app will work with third-party accessories, and Apple introduced the first three Find My-enabled partners: VanMoof, Belkin, and Chipolo. And even more Find My improvements are coming when Apple releases iOS 14.5 this month. Here is the scoop on how these products work and what could be coming in the future for Find My. But first, a little history.
Find My: the first decade
Back in 2008, Apple launched a $99/year service called MobileMe. It replaced a previous service called .Mac (which replaced a previous service called iTools). MobileMe, bundled lots of different features such as an online picture gallery, backup software, online storage, and more. On June 17, 2009, Apple released iPhone Software 3.0. One of the new features was Find My iPhone, which allowed MobileMe customers to discover the location of their iPhone using the GPS on the iPhone — useful if you lost your iPhone or if it was stolen.
The next year, on November 22, 2010, Apple released iOS 4.2. It expanded the Find My iPhone service so that everyone could use it if they were using the latest Apple hardware (such as the iPhone 4) without the need to subscribe to MobileMe.
The next year, Apple added the ability to find someone else's iPhone in a feature that Apple called Find My Friends. It was released in October 2011, along with iOS 5. If a friend or family member agreed to share their location with you (using the GPS on the iPhone), you could find their location. For a few years, Find My Friends was a separate app that you had to download, but then it became part of the operating system in 2015 with iOS 9.
From the addition of Find My iPhone to MobileMe in 2009 until September 19, 2019, The Find My iPhone and Find My Friends service relied upon GPS in the device that you were trying to locate — or Wi-Fi, if the device didn't have GPS enabled but was connected to a Wi-Fi network. Thus, if you owned an iPad that didn't have cellular service and you lost it in a location that didn't have Wi-Fi, you would never be able to find the device again using the Find My iPhone service. Or if you lost an iPhone while it was in airplane mode (because, for example, you left it on an airplane), the Find My iPhone would not work for you.
Find My: offline access for Apple devices
On June 3, 2019, at Apple's WWDC developer conference, Apple previewed some of the new features of iOS 13 (which would be released on September 19, 2019). Apple announced that it was combining Find My iPhone and Find My Friends into a single service called Find My. More importantly, Apple announced that the Find My service would, for the first time, work with devices that were offline.
This service still works today, and here is how it works. Let's say that you lose your iPad. You can use the Find My app on your iPhone to mark your iPad as missing. Whenever your missing iPad gets close to someone else using an Apple device with Bluetooth such as an iPhone or an iPad, that device senses your iPad and reads a unique number transmitted by your missing iPad. The next time that the iPhone is communicating with Apple, it adds something to the end of the communication that essentially says "oh and by the way, I recently passed by a device that was transmitting this specific number." Apple checks that number against its database and notices that this is an item that you marked as missing, so it alerts the Find My app on your iPhone that your iPad was spotted as such-and-such location.
The entire process is completely anonymous, so you won't know who else had an iPhone close to your missing iPad. Similarly, that person they won't even know that they played a role in helping you to locate your missing iPad. To add to the security, that unique number transmitted by your missing iPad changes every 15 minutes. That way, if you stroll through a shopping center holding your iPad over the course of a few hours, the shopping center cannot create a map of all of the places that you visited along the way by using a series of Bluetooth devices to continuously track the location of the device emitting that unique number.
Find My works with most devices sold by Apple, including the iPhone, iPad, Macs, Apple Watch, and AirPods. For the AirPods, however, this service is less useful. Even though AirPods have Bluetooth, the Find My service doesn't seem to work when the AirPods are in the charging case. Thus, all that the Find My service can do is tell you the last time that your AirPods were connected to your iPhone (or another device) using Bluetooth. For example, as I am typing this paragraph on my home computer on Wednesday night, I can see my AirPods right next to me on my desk. However, if I use the Find My feature, my iPhone tells me that my AirPods are in my office — or, to be more precise, that my AirPods were last seen at my office at 12:47 pm because that is the last time that they were connected to my iPhone (as I was listening to a podcast while having lunch at my desk).
From the standpoint of Find My, it would be better if my AirPods had GPS, or at least had Bluetooth that would connect to any other Apple device, because that way I could get more accurate information on the current location. Nevertheless, even this more limited information is still sometimes helpful.
Find My: offline access for the masses
That brings us to today. Or more accurately, to June 22, 2020. That is when Apple first announced that it was going to open its Find My service to third-party devices.
Yesterday, Apple announced three of those third-party partners. One of them is VanMoof, a company that makes electric bikes. The company's latest S3 and X3 e-bikes will soon work with the Apple Find My system.
This means that if you lose your e-bike (or someone else takes it), you can use the Find My app to find it. When the e-bike gets range of anyone using an Apple device that knows where it is located — such as an iPhone, iPad, or Mac — you will be notified. Chance Miller of 9to5Mac has a report with some screenshots showing how this works.
Another partner that Apple announced is Belkin. Belkin's SOUNDFORM Freedom True Wireless Earbuds will work with Apple's Find My. It's unclear to me if the support will work the same as it currently works with AirPods — in other words, you can only track location while the Belkin earbuds are connected to your iPhone — or if they will provide location information when anyone's Apple device is nearby.
The final partner that Apple announced is Chipolo. The upcoming Chipolo ONE Spot (available in June) will be a small disk with a hole so that it can be attached to a keychain or similar fastener. I presume that it will be similar to the currently-shipping Chipolo ONE, which costs $25 and is 1.49 x 1.49 x 0.25 inches. You can attach one of these devices to your keychain, a knapsack, or even a pet. If you lose something with a Chipolo disk attached to it, the Find My app may be able to tell you where it is, and you should be able to make the Chipolo play a sound to further assist in the recovery.
Apple also announced that third-party device makers will soon be able to take advantage of Ultra Wideband technology in Apple devices that contain a U1 chip. This includes the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max that Apple released in 2019 as well as many more recent iPhones. Without the U1, you can get a general sense of an item's location. With U1, location detection is more precise and is directionally aware. For example, your iPhone could show you not just that a missing item is in your house, but could show you that it is over there, in the couch, between the second and third seat cushion.
What about stalkers?
In 2018, an ABC News affiliate in Houston ran a story about a woman who noticed that her ex would often show up at the same place that the woman was located — a house, a restaurant, even once an out-of-town location when the woman was on a trip. This seemed like a strange coincidence until the woman discovered that her ex had placed a Tile tracker in the woman's car. Using the Tile device (which works somewhat the same way as Find My), the ex was able to keep tabs on where the woman's car was located – and thus where the woman was located. She reported the stalking to the local police, and the ex was charged with a misdemeanor.
To try to prevent a stalker from doing something similar with a Find My tracking device, such as the upcoming Chipolo ONE Spot, Apple will reportedly include a new feature in iOS 14.5 (which should be out this month) called Item Safety Alerts. This feature, which is enabled by default, will notify you if an unknown item has been found moving with you. That way, if someone slipped a Chipolo ONE Spot into your briefcase or purse in an attempt to track your movements, your iPhone will eventually alert you. Apple has not yet provided details on how this will work. How long before you get the notification? What if the tracking device belongs to a friend or family member with whom you are traveling? But whatever the details, hopefully, Apple has found a way to eliminate or at least greatly reduce the opportunity for inappropriate use of Find My by stalkers.
What about Apple first-party devices?
We now know a little information about upcoming third-party devices, but what about upcoming first-party devices — tracker products made by Apple?
It has long been rumored that Apple was working on a tracker device called AirTags. In fact, almost exactly one year ago, Pururaj Dutta of Applesophy reported that he was watching a support video on the Apple website when he noticed a picture of the Settings app on an iPhone that actually referred to AirTags by name. Based on the rumors, AirTags will` be similar to the Chipolo ONE Spot device, but will apparently include the U1 chip to provide more accurate tracking. Juli Clover of MacRumors recently wrote an article rounding up all of the rumors on what AirTags may offer.
Conclusion
What started a dozen years ago as a way for you to find a lost iPhone is about to be released as a technology that can be used to locate just about anything — with amazing precision, thanks to the U1 chip. I look forward to the release of iOS 14.5 in a few weeks to learn more about how all of this works.
Of course, other companies, like Tile, have offered similar technology for years. But to work well, you need to have lots of people running the right software on their devices to increase the chance that your missing item is near a compatible device. I'm not sure how many people are running the Tile software on their devices, but I do know that there are a ridiculously large number of iPhones being used in the world. Thus, I suspect that we are very close to a time in which the Find My app on your iPhone will be the best possible way to locate an item.
