> this is a prime example of a piece of software that can only be trusted when an open-source implementation is provided.
Try FMD. https://f-droid.org/packages/de.nulide.findmydevice/
Try FMD. https://f-droid.org/packages/de.nulide.findmydevice/
The thing Google is announcing here is like the Apple "find my" network--it seems to allow you to use other people's devices to find your lost device simply based on a BLE ping.
That is something that is hard to build by yourself, and would benefit greatly from an industry-wide standard (more peer devices reporting locations!).
> simply based on a BLE ping
What if they disable Bluetooth?
The linked open source find my device app uses cell network to both receive commands and for location.
It wouldn't do a lot of good if thieves could just turn off Bluetooth, right?
The design of this is pretty clever: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet....
I presume somewhere you can turn this off for real, but the defaults seem sensible to me.
I'd guess that Bluetooth will never fully shut off, it would just look like it's turned off to other apps that would want to use it.
I think the real utility of tile/airtag/google-find-my-device is the network of other colluding devices listening for bluetooth pings and reporting on the location. Not least because apple (maybe google, don't know) forces your device to send reports if you want to use the feature. Heck, on modern phone OSs, you can't use BLE in apps without turning on the location service.