Apple Clarifies How Many Items Can Be Tracked in Find My

[ApostolisApo]

Apple greedy as usual…. I have 22 cats and 15 dogs to track with AirTags apart from my 12 AirPods…
Do I need a separate account now to track these??? I have no money for another account, all of it goes to my cute pets!!!!
If I lose any of my cats I will sue Apple for catiCIDE!!

 

[dlondon]

I didn't realise that I was already at the limit with personal and work devices and AirPods Pro counting as more than one of the allocation. I only have one AirTag but was debating whether to get one more.

 

[hagar]

The main problem I had and what made me come back to iPhone was inability to track Airpods if you don't own iPhone or iPad. You cannot register/add your Airpods to your Apple ID and you cannot track using Mac.

That’s not a problem but a feature, courtesy of Apple’s Ecosystem 😀

 

[votdfak]

Yeah, a feature to force me back to iPhone LOL (it's not the worst decision). I've tried other earphones/buds, but APPs are the best for my ears. Sold APMs, too many flaws for my taste.

 

[wanha]

This seems like an odd limitation, as I would imagine it's mostly Apple's own products (phones, tablets, AirPods, AirTags, etc) that people use Find My for.

Why limit that??

 

[wanha]

You're assuming the limitation is arbitrary. I suspect it's a Bluetooth / networking limitation. 32 is pretty dark high for most people. That's a family of 4 with 8 devices each.

If Apple didn't impose a limit, and the tech couldn't keep tracking accurate, the situation would be way worse.

Hold on, I need an explanation.

How does adding more devices to Find My make the tracking less accurate?

Surely this is a cloud service that scales just like any other, or am I missing something?

 

[steve09090]

Hold on, I need an explanation.

How does adding more devices to Find My make the tracking less accurate?

Surely this is a cloud service that scales just like any other, or am I missing something?

I don’t know the answer, but I’m guessing that because you need to put the device near the iPhone to 'connect' it, it uses a Bluetooth resource. I am guessing that it’s not the cloud service side that’s an issue at all, but the number of devices that use Bluetooth slots. ???

I don’t know if there are limits in tracking family devices which would potentially confirm this is true.

 

[wanha]

I don’t know the answer, but I’m guessing that because you need to put the device near the iPhone to 'connect' it, it uses a Bluetooth resource. I am guessing that it’s not the cloud service side that’s an issue at all, but the number of devices that use Bluetooth slots. ???

I don’t know if there are limits in tracking family devices which would potentially confirm this is true.

Thanks Steve, that would indeed be a logical reason for the limitation

 

[returnZero]

Supposedly each item per user takes up about 1mb of data (connected bluetooth, gps, item desc and so on forth) which is multiplied by 32, then there are about 1.46 billion active Apple users around the world. Let's say half of those users ( 730 mil) are actually using the AirTag. It comes to about 23.35 petabytes. If I'm not mistaken, Apple is using Amazon storage service and according to their current rate, in order to store 1 petabyte worth of data, the estimate is around from 88k to $360k per year.

 

[Eudes Corrêa]

I just bought like 10 “find my” compatible trackers on Aliexpress, almost hit the previous limit without noticing 🤣

And I didn’t buy all the trackers I wanted, the one card shaped because the battery isn’t replaceable I didn’t get it, also is was made os glass and people posted pictures of it shattered, when finding one made of plastic with a rechargeable battery would be more tempted.

I cannot wait to put a $30 tracker on my $10 wallet 🤣

 

[ifxf]

#define MAX_STUFF 32

I mean, I guess the fact so many of us are surprised means it’s not much of an issue, but it sure seems like an odd limitation, and surprisingly low. Especially if it used to be 16?

Developers love powers of 2. Use to indicate how many bits to allocate for packed storage. Now it is mostly tradition.

 

[StuBeck]

Considering how expensive Apple products really are, limiting Find My tracking is silly. Only a handful of people could get 32 trackable Apple devices.

The real problem is device handover. Sometimes old devices is still stuck with the old Find My account, cluttering the list of devices.

My wife and I aren't really rich, but with 2 iPhone 13s, a work iPhone 12, two Apple Watch 6s, two sets of headphones, two iPads, 3 computers (work gave me one), and 4 air tags, we are already at 16. Adding in a few more people to a family and its easy to get to 32.

The more concerning bit is why Apple keeps information like this secret. They've already had issues with making changes, not citing it anywhere, and essentially losing lawsuits over it. I don't know why they continue to insist on not telling us what they're doing.

 

[dmfresco]

I have many of the same questions you all have posed here. In my FindMy app, I see items for myself and three other family members. Interestingly, I see some items like AirPods for people I don't know. I am assuming that these items were lost AirPods that someone else found and decided to keep. I also see some Macs and an iPad I got from my old job, that I no longer possess. All told, I see 22 devices and 6 AirTags. Can I choose to forget some of these items so that do not count against my limit?

Update: Clicking in the information i will let you remove an item.

P.S. Interestingly, all of these rogue items are NOT sharing location information. And even for items I am NOT the principal owner, I can remove them from my FindMy app, alert me when found, and remotely wipe them‽‽‽ Who knew?

P.P.S. After studying the various items in our family's home, even if someone connects to another person's item such as AirPods, it appears even if that item is not sharing information. I suspect if there is a hard limit of 32 items per person, it's only ones that are sharing location information or perhaps the 32 most recent items?

 

[vegetassj4]

‘Items’ are mentioned. Is this literal or per Find My’s classification? if AirPods count towards the ‘items’ limit though they are listed in ’devices’. What about the watch? Or are we just talking about ’dumb’ devices with the H chips?

Do phones, computers and iPads count? Would be nice to have a list on what exactly is included/excluded from the count.

 

[System603]

[...] Adding in a few more people to a family and its easy to get to 32.

[...] I don't know why they continue to insist on not telling us what they're doing.

Agree. I have:
- 8 personal devices (counted as 10 as one is APP2)
- 8 personal AirTags
- 4 shared AirTags
that's at least 18 slots (if all devices count), 22 if shared items count. If both count against the limit, then I'm glad they've increased it.

>If< shared count, I can easily see some larger families having trouble. But that's if, so 16 was silly low and while 32 seems reasonable, it's definitely not safe for all.

I don’t know the answer, but I’m guessing that because you need to put the device near the iPhone to 'connect' it, it uses a Bluetooth resource. I am guessing that it’s not the cloud service side that’s an issue at all, but the number of devices that use Bluetooth slots. ???

I don’t know if there are limits in tracking family devices which would potentially confirm this is true.

I (also just guessing) doubt that, as you don't necessarily have to have all your devices connected at once and also other Apple devices report location of yours. But then who knows. Maybe Apple's implementation is really that inefficient so far. If that's the case I hope they're working on a better solution.

I understand this just as an arbitrary limit against abuse going hand in hand with efficiency of a system. From the fact that they were able to increase it from 16 to 32, there is or at least clearly was at least *some* way.

Maybe we're just discussing a silly column type of "user's item id" in some database that was set intentionally low and then changed from signed to unsigned and they just don't want to jump from 32 to 256 or something 😄 But of course then there will be at least some limits for BLE and regular devices from Bluetooth standard and its implementation.

 

[H.E. Pennypacker]

This reminded me to delete all my old devices I don’t have anymore.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Why even the limit at all, especially for larger families?

There is always a limit somewhere, the computer can only count so high. It’s not a coincidence that it went from 16 to 32. It’s just about how many bits are allocated to the identifier or some other important number. At some point there is likely to be performance problems. I notice it already takes several seconds for all my items to refresh. I don’t have 16 but it’s more than a few. I can’t imagine how laggy it would be trying to update location on 64 devices.

 

[Fuzzball84]

Maybe unlike the rest of their software... the Find My back-end is still using 32 bits 🧐

 

[DarthDon]

"Hey Siri, where are my Airpods?". "The Lover of your wife is wearing them" 🤣

 

[lkrupp]

And yet before this discovery there wasn’t a single complaint from anyone who couldn’t add more than 32 devices to Find My. Nothing on the Apple Support Communities (ASC), nothing I could find on the tech blogs I visit regularly. Now, all of a sudden, there’s rage and recrimination over the limit?

 

[MarkNewton2023]

Glad to hear the limit increase. Thanks and appreciation to Apple! Keep calm, be thankful for the limit increase and be happy!😊 Life is too short to be unhappy 😊

 

[Le Big Mac]

I don’t know the answer, but I’m guessing that because you need to put the device near the iPhone to 'connect' it, it uses a Bluetooth resource. I am guessing that it’s not the cloud service side that’s an issue at all, but the number of devices that use Bluetooth slots. ???

I don’t know if there are limits in tracking family devices which would potentially confirm this is true.

But your phone isn't necessarily tracking all of them simultaneously - e.g., you go out for a run with your phone but leave your bike/luggage/laptop at home. Is the 32 limit just because at some point your phone (rather than the vast apple network) is the one finding/locating the item?

 

[Kar98]

I could see this being an issue if someone likes to use AirTags a lot.

I was just wondering about using AirTags for fleet tracking…

 

[victorvictoria]

32 is not enough. I need at least 256…

 

[ignatius345]

I couldn't find my AirPods Pro the other day and they just were straight up missing from Find My. I started getting worried I'd left them somewhere and someone had reset them or something (?). I ended up finding them in a coat pocket. They were charged the whole time and I was at home on my wifi network. Seems like Find My kind of crapped the bed there.