The Find My Android Device tool is very useful if your phone is lost or stolen… as long as it’s on, because as soon as they turn it off or it runs out of battery and turns itself off, it’s over: you won’t be able to locate it anymore. While there are different ways to locate an Android device, turning it off remains everyone’s Achilles heel, as you won’t know its last location until the battery’s last gasp.
Fortunately it counted the hours. 91Mobiles echoes some lines discovered in the recently released Android 14 source code, particularly in the hardware abstraction layer called hardware.google.bluetooth.power_off_finder. These are precisely the ones who will do the magic. This snippet confirms that Google is working to make Find My Device or Find My Device works even when an Android phone is turned off.
That this possibility seems familiar to you (or even that you wonder why it is not yet possible on Android) is normal, because Find my iPhone from iOS has had this feature for years.
Find my device even if it’s turned off
How will Google implement this feature? According to the leaked code, the key will reside in the Bluetooth hardware, which will stay on even when the phone is turned off. If this feature is also combined with ultra-wideband (UWB) technology, Google’s servers will be able to identify where your phone is with a moderately good level of accuracy whether it’s turned off or on. This procedure is quite similar to what Apple uses for its devices, so it makes sense.
For this to be a reality, the phone’s hardware must first allow the Bluetooth module to work autonomously so that it is switched on at all times, which does not happen in practice: probably nowadays there are no Android devices on the market that support this possibility. Therefore, this function will have to be implemented in future devices, so it is expected that it will first reach the Google Pixel generation and then expand to other manufacturers.
In this sense, it should be noted that Google wants to have its own AirTag (whose code name is “grogu”) and everything indicates that it is in the development phase. This news fits perfectly in this direction, making him have It makes sense that Google is making progress in the Find My Device feature. This year.
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