Unfortunately the anti-stalking features have made Airtag mostly useless for theft prevention. You have less than an hour to retrieve your item before the tag alerts the thief they are being tracked. I've seen it trigger as quickly as 30 minutes.
There are technical limitations in Apples design that prevents Android or anyone else from fixing it.
I left iOS because of degrading UX, and the UX of these products has got even worse as a result.
Try running airpods pro against any android phone. Severely degraded experience on purpose to the point of rendering them worse than chinese 10$ aliexpress buds and practically useless. Wife had them, worked fine with iphone mini 13 but she hated iOS with passion so eventually reverted back to samsungs. She had to give airpods pro to her sister who still has apple phone and bought some cheapish buds for 50 bucks which work flawlessly and she is happy again.
Maybe engineers at apple are consistently incompetent to implement basic bluetooth unlike any chinese sweatshop, but somehow I refuse to believe so.
While this is true, Airtags are not designed for theft prevention, and never have been. They're designed to locate lost items.
Apple should be applauded for making the only tracking tags with literally any kind of anti-stalking features at all.
I don’t think anyone is making a claim that we should live with this according to first principles. I think people are saying this trade-off currently exists because it doesn’t seem to be economically or technologically feasible to solve both well.
How do you propose making an improvement to tracking technology that reduces theft while at the same time not assisting stalking?
One idea: if you report your AirTag as stolen, then it can continue to track the item, but you lose the ability to see where it is. In so doing you hand off tracking capability to some authority. This could be an improvement to the extent that the authority is trustworthy and well behaved. Unfortunately, such properties are not guaranteed across the globe. This would create more incentives for bribery for example.
It would be if stalking happened at the same frequency as property theft, but the rates are ridiculously lopsided.
So much property theft happens that we don't bother reporting almost any of it.
But I'd really, really not like to find out someone was following me around.
I bet Apple could produce some really interesting data from these tools and others that could be used to proactively target stalkers and investigate them before their actions escalate to violence.
Let's get Tom Cruise in here and whoop some ass!
But the impact of the two activities is also lopsided:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_matrix
Stalking can potentially result in rape and death, even if there's a low probability of stalking happening in general.
Initially they didn’t have it, people complained, now they do, and people still complain.
Of course, there is an implicit bias with measuring stalking as "peaceful" stalkers who never get caught leave no evidence. Unlike theft which always leaves evidence by its nature (the thing is gone).
This is like nerfing knifes because they can kill people.
So you can either keep a tag on your stuff that lets anyone know where you are at all times, or just not misplace your keys. It really doesn't seem that hard to not use something this privacy intrusive if that's your threat model.
They did have anti-stalking from the start btw. People still complained that it wasn’t good enough so they reduced some of the timings.
My Samsung SmartTag gives me a notification if the bike changes position and I'm not nearby. Actually giving me a chance to track it down.
in my case, the damage was so much i wish i had just left it stolen and taken the bigger insurance payout.
But Apple does more stuff as well, like encrypting your phone and making it so even harvesting a stolen phone for parts is unattractive (everything has serial numbers and you can't just swap a part out).
There would a. be less dumb criminals around to repeat offend and b. The smarter would-be criminals will do the calculus and and not steal items which could have tags.
You can tell there's an AirTag, and there's no easy way to remove it.
https://www.elevationlab.com/collections/airtag/products/tag...
This is also quite ridiculous, as it literally gives away that there is an AirTag there. I have seen people removing the speaker to eliminate this flaw.
If the Airtag can't reach the thief's phone, it starts chirping by itself within an 8-24 hour window.
My Chipolo certainly still works.
There are [cheap] tags being sold that are compatible with both Apple Find My and Google's Find Hub. I would rather have a dual-network device than Apple's improved model.
Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?
Here is an example of dual-network tags:
https://www.amazon.com/Tracker-Locator-Android-Bluetooth-Fin...
https://developer.apple.com/find-my/
> Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?
Yes. It is surprisingly a near impossible engineering challenge at the levels Apple hardware is being done. Have you even considered the wear and tear that a mere hole in an ABS plastic molded detail would be subjected to over the lifespan of...several years?
(Just kidding, obviously they just want to upsell their customers with extremely overpriced accessories.)
I imagine that Airtag functionality is disabled when Find Hub configures these tags.
I have heard in the commentary here that Chipolo is now making dual-network devices, but only one can be active at a time.
Apple has a larger and more sensitive network, so uses requiring tracking quality would lean that way.
I would prefer to find a tag that can be provisioned on both networks. I don't know if any actually work that way.
I'd also like a tag that would let me take it apart and disable the speaker. For my car, that seems appropriate, if I can also find a placement location which is extremely difficult to access.
Edit: Google is saying that "they generally require switching between networks rather than operating on both simultaneously."
Some ideas for location: behind the glovebox or under the spare tire.
I am planning to purchase one, cut the speaker connection, and put it in my car.