Bluetooth tags for Android’s 3 billion-strong tracking network are here

Enlarge / Track all your stuff, with Android, in a totally not creepy way. (credit: Google)

After the release of Apple’s AirTags, Google suddenly has interest in the Bluetooth tracker market. The company has already quietly rolled out what must be the world’s largest Bluetooth tracking network via Android’s 3 billion active devices, and now trackers are starting to plug in to that network. Google is taking the ecosystem approach and letting various companies plug in to the Android Bluetooth tracking network, which has the very derivative name of “Find My Device.”

While these Bluetooth trackers are great for finding your lost car keys on a messy desk, they can also work as worldwide GPS trackers and locate items much farther away, even though they don’t have GPS. The IDs of Bluetooth devices are public, so Tile started this whole idea of crowdsourced Bluetooth tracker location, called the “Tile Network.” Every phone with the Tile app installed scans Bluetooth devices in the background and, using the phone GPS, uploads their last seen location to the cloud. This location data is only available to the person who owns the Tile, but every Tile user works to scan the environment and upload any Tiles the app can see.

Tile is a decently popular product, but it’s nothing like the scale of our favorite smartphone duopoly, Apple and Google. Apple upended the market when it released AirTags and rolled out a bluetooth tracking network to most of the 1.8 billion Apple devices that are out there. While Tile could reliably work in busy places like airports, you’ll probably never be more than a few hundred feet from an iPhone at any given time, making for a much more viable worldwide tracking network.