Find My Device network for Android
As speculated last week, today Google has officially announced that it is finally rolling out its long-awaited revamped Find My Device network for Android, which also works with offline devices. It’s going live on devices running Android 9 and up worldwide, starting today in the US and Canada.
There will be over a billion devices in the network, so it will be very easy to locate them even if you are offline. As a bonus for the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, these will be able to be tracked even when they’re turned off or out of battery, thanks to some “special Pixel hardware.”
Starting in May, new Bluetooth tracker tags will become available from Chipolo and Pebblebee, and will be discoverable in the Find My Device app, as they’re built specifically for the new Find My Device network. They’ll also be compatible with Unknown Tracker Alerts on both Android and iOS to protect against – you guessed it – unwanted tracking. Additional Bluetooth tags will come from Anker’s Eufy, Jio and Motorola later this year.
If you’re close to a lost device but still can’t see it, a “Find Nearby” button will appear to help you find where it is near you. It will work with the new Bluetooth tags mentioned above from May.
If you’re at home and have Nest devices, the Find My Device app will be able to detect the proximity of a lost device to those Nest devices. Finally, you can also ‘share’ the device with people, so you can easily find them if they go missing.
Google says it has implemented “multi-layered security” in its new Find My Device network to help keep you safe and your personal information private. For example, location data is end-to-end encrypted, while aggregated device location reporting is a “first-of-its-kind security feature” that provides additional protection against unwanted tracking in a home or private space.
In the near future, software updates are coming to headphones from JBL, Sony, and others that will allow them to join Google’s new Find My Devices network.
The launch of this new Find My Device network from Google has been put on hold for several months while it waits for Apple to implement unwanted tracking protections in iOS. It looks like it will finally go live in iOS 17.5, which should be released soon, and that’s why the new Find My Device network is going live now.