Find My application inconsistent

[bonebrain]

Not sure if anyone else has seen this as I was not able to find this while searching. I just bought some airtags for a trip we were taking and put them in our checked suitcases. I know that the location is going to be somewhat intermittent depending upon what Apple devices are nearby but what I found was rather odd. Too long of a story about the horrors of air travel these days but what happened is that while we did get on the plane but we did not make the trip while our bags did take a short journey. The airline did put in to have the bags returned to our original airport so we went home and I started tracking our bags. What I found is that the Find My app on my iPad and Macbook Pro both showed the location of both bags my iPhone, where I first initiated the airtags, showed one bag still at the original airport. While I continued to watch the bags the iPhone never updated the stalled bag, it did indicate the last seen location, while the iPad the laptop kept getting the updates.

I kept looking for a way to refresh the app and I even restarted my iPhone but nothing cleared. Now that the bag is back at the original airport the iPhone has caught up. Has anyone else observed this strange application behavior? The tags appear to be working flawlessly and the iPad and the computer were fine. Why was the phone so far behind? All devices are current for updates

 

[Slartibart]

all three devices were on the same network? My first hypothesis would be that there is something different related to which telco they connect… maybe you had some data saving activated on your iPhone?

 

[bonebrain]

same network. The other airtags updated it was just one of them that was showing the last location message

 

[Slartibart]

OS versions of the different devices? Firmware version of the Airtag?

 

[bonebrain]

Well iPad and iPhone are basically the same although one is now iPadOS where the other is IOS. Mac is M1 current version. Didn't really look at airtags but they are all the same. The key here is that the airtags are working. The iPhone for some reason is not picking up the data from one of the airtags while the other devices are clearly seeing the data/. So the issue really is with the retrieval mechanism used. While the issue of staleness is showing on the iPhone for a single airtag, there are three in use, when in fact it is clear that the data in the cloud is up to date and not stale.