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Comment by bcherny | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a bunch of AirTags for my family: for our keys, our bike, our luggage.

Annoyingly, every AirTag needs to be linked to a single iPhone. Even when everyone belongs to the same Family. AirTags also make annoying sounds every time I grab my keys to go out.

They’re still the best UX on the market, but I wish Apple would improve the UX just a bit more. Maybe their policy folks are worried about news stories about people using AirTags to stalk, which is unfortunately a reasonable fear.

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This is surprisingly powerful anti-marketing from Apple. I got some AirTags to keep track of our keys without realizing that AirTags can’t be shared within a family. I hoped they’d be useful to my wife, who sometimes forgets her purse, but she absolutely hates them as they’re always giving her warnings. I loaned my car to my sister and now she and her husband are off the list of potential customers, too. I get the stalking concerns, but I’m surprised that the solution was to make the product completely unusable for anyone but single people.

Interesting point you make.

My wife and I have shared an icloud account since before family sharing was an option but i was way too cheap to by multiple copies of a weather app etc.

It works fine short of having to make some new tweaks each time i update/restore/add a device (mostly around setting options in iMessage and Facetime to uncheck my numbers on her device and vice versa on mine.).

I have been increasingly mulling over setting up family sharing. But I am also planning a longer trip to another country and bought some airtags for luggage etc, but also to use for our keys/wallet etc.

These comments have me saying sticking with the current setup would be preferred. Specifically for the airtags.

AFAIK if you setup a family the notifications go away. What would solve this for couples that aren't quite that committed would be a way to share the location info on an AirTag or at least be able to mark a particular tag as 'known' or 'safe'. I think with either of those but particularly the former all of the stalking concerns kind of go away. If you can also access and see the location for an AirTag in particular if you do need to get away for some reason you can find and dump the offending tag(s) or potentially disable them.

I don't really get why Apple doesn't have an option to do that already. It seems much better for shared objects and people like the Author and it doesn't seem like there are any technical hurdles to providing that.

The notifications do not go away. My wife is on my iCloud family plan and she still gets them constantly. That’s what’s so bizarre about the whole setup.

I definitely think there should be a way to attach tags to a family.

Like the original article I use one in my dog. I know it’s not the purported use, but it has and does work for us.

> I use one in my dog.

I tried this but it’s annoying to have to keep feeding it to the dog every other day. We eventually just attached it to her collar.

My dog did a runner a week after we got her, only found her thanks to the AirTag. Despite all the AirTag annoyances, I'll definitely keep using one on the dog.

Particularly because there's already shared Apple services mapped to Families. It's very frustrating.

This is super annoying for me, as I bought a tag for our shared mailbox key thinking we both could find it when needed, but only my devices can. It seems crazy to me that this still hasn't been implemented in over a year now - iCloud family plans exist, CloudKit sharing zones exist since last year (In public API form, so likely they existed internally for even longer.)

Also the device ID's are already shared internally in some fashion across an iCloud family, as my key tracker doesn't make my wife's phone detect an unknown tag and vice versa.

Ideally you should be able to share beyond the family, IE I let my parents borrow the car, I should be able to "loan" the tag to their account (And I guess choose whether I can see tracking or not.) But if we don't have family plans we obviously won't get to this point any time soon.

Why does it seem crazy to you?

Here's what likely happened -- they built the entire system from the ground-up based on a single-user because integrating with iCloud family wasn't part of the MVP.

By the time someone got around to asking about it, they realized that their data model was so thoroughly fucked it would take several weeks of risky migrations in order to add multi-user support.

So stakeholders are punting on it left and right. The things are selling, so is multi-user support really that important? It's an "edge case".

Alternate interpretation: Any multi-user support will be wielded by abusers, and no other use cases deserve precedence over inhibiting abuse, so all multi-user cases result in unpredictable sound and/or push notifications to inhibit abuse.

I expect Apple will eventually add “This AirTag has been traveling with you for a while, are you okay with that?” random pop-up notifications, the same way that it randomly confirms “Always Allow” location access and “Time-sensitive” notifications access.

I explain the little chirping sound the one in my glovebox sometimes makes when I start my car to anyone riding with me who doesn’t recognize it, so that they understand what that sound is and to pay attention and be conscious of what it means whenever they hear it.

If occasional chirps are the price I have to pay to inhibit abuse by a global tracking network, then that’s a small annoyance paid for a great good for others.

There’s also the obvious privacy problem of family members stalking each other.

On the iCloud family settings page you can enable/disable sharing your location with the rest of your family. I imagine AirTags would be the same.

That being said, if you aren't comfortable with family members knowing your location, then why would you want to share AirTags or an iCloud with them in the first place?

That’s the point. I don’t want to share AirTags with them.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it’s a difficult and tricky use case.

While I wouldn't want to do so too, it should at least be possible to have an option to ignore the AirTags from family members travelling with you.

that's already the case if the have iphones...

Meanwhile someone else is working on multi user support for AirTags v2 for a nice promotion packet.

Not to mention that Apple, in general, isn’t really known for their multiuser-friendly ways.

I was too cheap to buy airtags so I bought a cheap knockoff, the Nutale Findthing. The family sharing actually works very well. They were crazy cheap and have replaceable batteries even. Crazy that a cheap amazon knockoff would have a better experience than Apple.

I’ve heard similar reports, but I keep air tags in my kid’s backpacks and the tags never seem to make noises in them.

Maybe because they are in predictable contact with me / predictable routes.

I have an AirTag in my bag and it beeps maybe twice a day for no apparent reason, It'll be in the same room as me, I have my phone with me, and I'm in this same room every day. It doesn't send me the notification the bag is "lost", it just starts beeping.

I found that turning of Bluetooth causes the beeping. I have it turned on and haven’t heard them in ages

The difference in experience from user to user is striking.

I believe in the next couple of years, they would have done their extensive research and have the feature like how we got with Photos after years of wait.

I switched back to tile because of this and haven’t regretted it.

Tile simply doesn’t work for us in rural areas. There’s not even remotely the same device density as the iPhone.

Fair, but I’ve found I basically never use other people’s devices, just the last seen location to see where I left something. The only cases where there something was tracking movement was in the case where my wallet was stolen and they were smart enough to remove the credit-card shaped tile in it and bin it immediately in a different place; I imagine my much more conspicuous airtag on my partner’s keys would share the same fate.

The last and only time I actually had to use my Tile, it didn’t even work in a frickin’ major international airport.

I think it’s funny how people gripe about AirTags and how they have stalking notifications. This was never an issue with Tile because you couldn’t stalk someone with it if you wanted to. It is only an “issue” with AirTags because they actually work.

Interesting to hear this, not having tried Tile myself. It does seem like Apple’s big competitive advantage (along with access to low level device APIs they don’t offer to developers).

I abandoned my tile and am considering getting an iPhone just for AirTags.

Tile is close to useless for tracking lost items [1] except when it's in you own home. Also, I am very annoyed they try to get you into a subscription model for sending you replacement batteries, but also for app features that have no business being locked behind a subscription. Juicero, anyone?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wefUV_bR0Y&t=83s

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