Many of you may be familiar with Tile, an accessory that you can attach to many household objects or personal belongings and track or locate it via (UWB) Bluetooth if it gets lost. Apple has created something similar within its ecosystem called the Apple AirTag.
To date, Android users have no Google-branded accessory to attach to their things in their homes or around them in case something is misplaced. Let’s say, for example, you can’t find your Google TV remote, your car keys, etc. Obviously, both of these things get sucked into the deep dark crevices of your couch, but most people never think to look there until they’ve searched everywhere else.
Anyway, it looks like Google is, in fact, working on an Apple AirTag competitor for its loyal customers. According to Mishaal Rahman and Kuba Wojciechowski on Twitter, who have both uncovered evidence for such a device, Google will likely open support for “Locator tags” in the Fast Pair developer console for third-party hardware.
Additionally, it’s said that the company is also working on its own first-party tracker as well. Likely because it will be a small and adorable accessory that affects things over some distance invisibly like the Force from Star Wars, it’s become codenamed “Grogu”. Anyone familiar with the Mandalorian TV series will recognize this cute Force-sensitive character in a heartbeat (and no, it’s not “Baby Yoda”!). Also, I realize that Grogu is about 50 human years old, but that doesn’t make him any less cute.
Kuba says it could launch under the Nest brand, but there’s no guarantee. However, it’s probably set to arrive sometime near the end of the year around Google’s October Pixel device launch with onboard speakers like Apple’s AirTags and in a variety of colors as well. The speaker, for those of you wondering, would be for emitting a loud noise to help you track it down upon activation. It also has UWB (ultra wide band) support, making it extremely accurate in helping you find whatever it’s attached to!
Let’s chat in the comments – do you find that you’d use a Google-branded tracker? The hilarity of me even asking that knowing that most people already hate how much Google tracks them and makes use of their data (despite its purposes) is not lost on me, but I figured I’d ask anyway. I’ve seen some folks on Twitter stating they would attach one of these to their belongings if they could explicitly use them offline but knowing Google, they’re going to integrate these little things into their Find My Device network and allow you to track devices over a larger distance via the network.
Feature Photo by Daniel Romero
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