With my iPhone using the UWB tracking is a huge feature for me. The fact that it can tell you so quickly if you’re in the right general area, then which direction to get closer, then when you’re right on top of it, it’s pretty magical. I would love to see cross platform standards continue to develop out of this so we can get these features built into to everything.

You are severely limited with what you can do with the AirTags if you don’t have an iPhone. You need to pair it to an Apple account, and you don’t have access to Apple’s Find My Device network on Android.

Apple’s and Google’s network aren’t inter-operable and do not communicate with eachothers and will not transmit location data across both.

The only thing the Android device will be able to do with it is report the presence of an AirTags without a connection to its paired iOS device in the vicinity as an anti-stalking feature, make it ring to facilitate its discovery and the ability to scan it’s builtin NFC tag to read the owner info.

I have a few air tags tied to my work iPhone. My main phone is a pixel and I didn’t even realize you could connect them together. As soon as you open an air tag near an iPhone you get a little pop up prompting you to set it up and off you go. They only update location when they come within range of a new iPhone but that’s pretty constant anymore.

My daughter is on the spectrum and I have one in her bookbag. It’s cool sometimes being able to watch her bus ride to and from school as she passes by different phones 😂

Cheap iPhone SE seems useful to have as a back up phone for stuff like that. I actually wish it was even smaller because of that.