Apple finally launched its AirTags a few months ago, and although this is a type of product that has been around as such for many years, it had something different: It uses the iPhone to find beacons out of reach with the power of the collaborative network, oh crowdsourcing. Google seems to be working on something similar.
This seems to emerge from information uncovered by XDA, where the text strings included in the beta of Google Play services speak of a Find my device network, whereby your phone helps find other people’s phones.
Find Android mobiles using Android mobiles
Google can find your device for a long time, but search does. The cellphone you must be connected to the internet so that Google can manipulate it. Otherwise, you will be able to see its last location before it disconnected, but not much else.
A solution to what is imposed is use other mobiles to find devices even if they are disconnected, for example, via Bluetooth. Samsung announced it last October during SmartThings Find and Apple did the same with the launch of AirTags. Now Google seems to be preparing the same thing, globally for Android.
According to the text strings found in the beta of Google Play services, the system would be given the name of Find my device network And that would basically do that, use your mobile to help you find devices nearby. At the moment, there are no further details, although it is normal for technologies like Bluetooth BLE and UWB to be used to make Android mobiles become beacons to locate lost devices around them.
In this way, Android mobiles would become in a huge network to find devices (There are around 3,000 million devices), although it remains to be seen whether it will be active or not. XDA’s findings seem to determine that this will be an option the user can turn on or off, but its default state is not yet known.
As always, we’ll have to wait and see what it ends up with. The fact that it relies on Google Play services is a good indication that could be backward compatible with recent versions of Android and does not depend on the last one, which is always appreciated. We may know more in the coming months.
Via | XDA
