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Comment by josephernest | Hacker News Reader

I don't have an iPhone or Mac. Can I buy an AirTag, initialize it with the help of a friend who has an iPhone, and then locate the AirTag or ring it from my PC with this Python lib?

It would be awesome.

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I bought some $8 third-party AirTags from AliExpress, flashed them with some firmware, and used Macless Haystack to track them without owning any Apple devices.

https://notes.stavros.io/programming/third-party-airtags-res...

Google have also launched their own network, Find, which is turned off by default and useless for now.

Note that, locating airtags and making them play sound requires them to be near some other iDevice (the battery is a standard CR2032), so if you live in a remote ranch or something and nobody around you has an iphone, they might not be very useful.

It wouldn't even need to be a remote ranch—everything I'm seeing suggests they have a range of between 30-100 feet depending on walls and whatnot, which means even in a typical suburb you've got pretty high odds that none of your neighbors have a device within range at the moment you need it.

My experience is that this is rarely true in reality. I live in a freestanding house in a suburban area (not in the US, let alone SF). I’ve moved a couple of times since I’ve started using AirTags. Even when none of my own devices have been around, I still manage to get quite frequent location updates.

How frequent is frequent?

For the use case of identifying where they are on a map, I can certainly believe that an iPhone will connect more often than you move the object the tag is attached to. But when it comes time to actually trigger a sound to find it stuck under a cushion or what have you, is there going to be an iPhone within range at that moment?

That's a very unusual use case. When one of my airtags is in my building I can locate it with ~0.1ft precision using UWB. No matter how many other iPhones are in the building I can't get <100ft precision without UWB.

The difference between "airtag is in under the top left corner of the couch cushion" and "airtag might be in the same building as you" is so large that I wonder why you don't get a old used iPhone and swap the battery to create a functional phone.

I'm not OP. I've got an iPhone and two iPads and a Mac in the house. I'm asking for OP, who has no i-devices and wants to know if an airtag would be useful anyway.

> Can I buy an AirTag, initialize it with the help of a friend who has an iPhone, and then locate the AirTag or ring it from my PC with this Python lib?

Ringing it might be an unusual case for you, but it's exactly what OP was asking about.

(It's also by far the most common use case for this category of device for me. I misplace things all the time and it's super convenient to not have to wander all over the house looking for it.)

Theoretically yes, once the AirTag is deployed the keys should be static and you should be ready to go. Apple should also not be able to "ban" the tag at some later point in time.

I would suggest signing into a separate Apple account that's under your control to pair the AirTag, however. Not due to the risk of being banned, but because I have the suspicion that removing an AirTag from your (friend's) account may prompt the device to instruct the AirTag to reset. But if you sign into another account, pair it using an iDevice and then log out, that shouldn't be an issue.

Tile Tracker already has that. I wouldn't relying on Apple being merciful.

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