I can’t imagine the horrible feeling you’d have in your gut if you realized you lost your phone or someone stole it. Our lives are so connected to smartphones that being without one while on the go, knowing someone else might try to access its data, is a scary thought.
There are ways to track lost or stolen devices Google has a “Find My Device” website and app that will track your phone or watch. Apple has their Find My service which does the same thing.
According to a new report, Google is developing a way to detect a device even when it’s powered off. This would be a pretty powerful addition to the tools that allow locating a missing device.
Apple already has this in their Find My service, so we’re in the clear. If you’ve lost an Apple device and it’s low on battery life, the Find My app is used by millions of iPhones, iPads and Macs around the world to “securely send the location of your lost device to iCloud.” You can then identify it.
For Google’s similar features, 91 mobiles Google is believed to be working on something called a “pixel power-off finder”. Google has developed a new hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for Android 14 called “hardware.google.bluetooth.power_off_finder” that has been shared with partners who want to use it. What’s interesting about this first name is that it suggests that Google might be working on it as a Pixel exclusive feature, but the generic naming of HAL means that others can use it and consider it their own name.
Whatever the end use case, the idea is that when your phone’s battery life is extremely low or the device is turned off, its Bluetooth chip will be turned on to ping nearby devices which can then share its locations. Again, this will be similar to Apple’s Find My Network.
Since we don’t know which devices are capable of hardware power off and Bluetooth on, we don’t know if this feature could be implemented on the back of the Pixel 7 or if it will only be available on the Pixel 8 and later. . As a potential Android 14 feature, there’s always a chance we’ll learn that piece of information in the coming weeks from a developer preview.