Journal AmiMoJo's Journal: Google's Find My Device network is a disaster 2
After waiting over a year for Apple to get their shit together and add stalker detection to iOS, Google finally released its Find My Device network, and some third party AirTag-like trackers.
It doesn't work. In tests people have found that the location of their tags simply doesn't update when away from them.
Google decided make phones only report the tags when they are in busy locations, as a privacy measure. In theory it won't detect someone else's tag at your house, really anywhere except for busy areas like large numbers of Android devices. You can opt in to reporting location anywhere, but during onboarding they don't even mention that you can do that.
In practice it means that your tags just don't work, even in busy places. People are returning their Pebble and Chipolo tags.
Another frustration is that they don't seem to have worked with many manufacturers on this, so all the tags are very expensive. You can get Apple compatible tags for a few bucks on AliExpress, which makes them cheap enough to use for things like tracking valuable packages.
For now I'm using the cheap tags, set up with my wife's iPhone, viewable on the iCloud web interface.
The way this is going, I can see Google killing their network sooner or later. I suppose it's too much to hope that the networks all merge together at some point (Google, Apple, Samsung, Tile etc.)
I had my phone next to me (Score:2)
Connected to the network, live.
I just didn't see it. So I go the the google find my device web site to make it ring.
Was unable to find it.
during 2 or 3 second I panic, looking everywhere and find my phone under a book I just read.
Then I see if everything was ok with my phone, connected to the wife network, to the lte network, I was able to reach it with ssh.
Then I retry the find my device google web shit... nothing
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair I have had good luck with finding my phone, when it's turned on. That always works, both location and ring. Mine is a Pixel, yours might be more aggressive about power management so not respond so quickly.
It's when your phone is off, and the battery powered tags that are the problem. Like Apple's AirTags, they send out a Bluetooth beacon periodically, and nearby devices detect it and report it back to Google. The problem seems to be that Google's default privacy setting makes it hide most of thos