Losing a device is always a pain, so Find My network seems to me, without a doubt, a success by Apple. And that, at the moment, is nothing more than a proposal with a lot of work to do. A proposal that, of course, has been produced these days, during the WWDC 2020, and that perhaps has gone a little unnoticed among the big announcements, such as the arrival of Apple Silicon or the news of the next versions of iOS 14 and MacOS Big Sur.
Apple users will find this name quite familiar, and it is indeed related, directly related to Find My, the service included within iCloud and that allows us, in case we have lost our device, and as long as it is turned on and has connectivity, to find out its exact location to be able to recover it, whether at a friend’s house, in the car, forgotten in a cafeteria or, as it often happens, under a cushion on the same sofa you are sitting on when you start looking for it.
Find My network goes one step further in this feature, as it proposes to use all Apple devices as potential lost device detectors. This is, according to the company itself, a network of hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads that, once Find My network is operational, they will remain in a passive listening mode waiting to find any signal that, by means of Bluetooth low consumption (BTLE), is saying (in their own language, of course), «help me, I’m lost”.
And how does Find My network work? Or, well, how it will work, to be more exact. The basic approach is quite simple: the user of the device will have to configure it (before losing it, obviously) so that the function is active, and also you will have to put a contact number and choose a message from a predefined list. That way, if the device is lost and found by someone else’s, they can see the contact information to locate the owner and help you retrieve it.
On the other hand, that is, if you are the user who finds a lost device and with Find My network activated, andhers will make a characteristic sound It will alert you to this circumstance and take you to the lost gadget, as well as indicating how to contact its owner to send it to them.
As stated at the beginning, what has been announced is that Apple has started working on it and that the first technical drafts will be available later this year. That means, of course, that we are not talking about a function that we are going to see neither in iOS 14 nor in MacOS X 16 Big Sur. Hopefully, if the work progresses fast, we will know of the launch of Find My network at WWDC 2021.
A very important aspect, yes, is that as indicated by Apple itself, the service will be available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and, soon, accessories from other manufacturers. Yes, you read correctly, the intention of Apple is to offer manufacturers of accessories for their devices the possibility that they can also be located, in case of loss, through Find My network. I admit that this has surprised me a lot, and for good, the truth.
–
