Looking for an alternative to tiles.
I realize lowjacking your stuff is kind of against the idea of privacy in the first place, but the convenience of being able to find lost items is big.
Are there any other locators that can use cellular service or just use BLE?
Tiles are just BLE, they’re pretty dumb devices that basically just broadcast a BLE ID.
But there are dedicated standalone GPS trackers that use LTE/5G, the downside is you need a SIM card and data plan, and they are a lot bigger with shorter battery life.
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.nulide.findmydevice/
You can at least self host this option. Still a lot of the same privacy issues any type of tracking software is going to have.
The advantage of Tile and AirTags is that they’re relatively dumb devices that leverage passing cell phones to snitch on their location. This means they can last months on a single charge while the phones do the heavy lifting.
There may be more and less private ways to do what they do, but they’ll all have similar tradeoffs.
A device that tracks its own location and reports it out over a cell network would basically require all the complexity and size of a smart phone minus the screen and cost similarly
There are Bluetooth trackers that can be run privately and with enough creativity can be used to identify the location of something within the confines of your home (or know if something is not home), but won’t be much help if you’re trying to track down lost luggage or want to know if you left your wallet at work or the coffee shop. (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fmBwINdsxQ)
