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How the 'Find My' App in iOS 13 and macOS Catalina Works

madmin said:
Sounds quite creepy and open to abuse
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Is designed to prevent just that. Your device being abused. So you could locate your device. I wish more companies would take this seriously.
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Brookzy said:
Sadly doesn't stop the parts market.
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True. But it would put off a lot of thiefs and raise awareness. No criminal wants to go around with a trackable device that gets tracked even when it is off line.
 
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The first thing any thief does when a product is stolen, is switch it off. Hopefully this will still send out a beacon when the device is off. In addition to that, I want to know what happens when your iPhone has ran out of battery. I know that when the phone has ran out, the battery still isn't fully depleted. As long as you are still able to see the empty battery logo, there is enough power to process that minimal startup. I would like to know that even if the battery is "dead", will it send out a BT beacon? Even if it only holds 1% remaining, that could be as much as 250-300mAh remaining, around the same amount a CR2032 has.

Coin cell BT beacons refreshing at 100ms give 1-3 months battery life on a coin battery. They use say 100µA per refresh, and if the refresh rate was changed to something like every 1sec when the device was "dead" (250mAh), it would allow the phone to give accurate signals for around 10 months.
 
Sorry, I just don’t get it...
At the moment we have on all devices including the Watch a perfectly working ‘Find My Friends’. However, this merging seems to kill off many parts to its operation.
1. You can’t use it to find family members or friends as they are not using your Apple ID.
2. Everyone has to be on iOS 13 in order for it to work: No good for those on older devices.
3. It’s no longer available on the Watch: I often leave my iPhone at home and use the ‘Find My Friends’ App on my watch. So, how on earth can I locate them if the App is no longer available?

All in all, I see this as a big step backwards.
 
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roadkill401 said:
Ok. Call me confused. But I gather this is going to kill of find my friends, and basically the new system will require everyone to be on ios13 to work. So if your using an iPhone 6 or earlier, you now loose the find my friend as you can’t load ios13, and likewise everyone with ios13 can’t see anyone who is not.

My wife has an iPhone SE but never upgraded the iOS. It runs fanstastic, fast, doesn’t crash and also don’t blast those emergency alerts amber alerts for some lost kid when you are sleeping. My daughter has an iPhone 7 and I have an iPad Air from 2014. We also have an older Mac mini running Sierra. I use find my friends to see when my daughter is coming home from school or my wife home from work. Helps me figure out when to make supper. Now from what I read as each person only has a single device that nobody can find anything? This is a step backwards.
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All your listed devices can be upgraded to Catalina or iOS 13. It’s a choice you have to make whether you want to upgrade to get the latest security updates and features. But that’s nothing new, it’s a choice we all have to make whenever new software is released. But it’s probably not fair to complain if you decide not to.
 
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steve23094 said:
All your listed devices can be upgraded to Catalina or iOS 13. It’s a choice you have to make whether you want to upgrade to get the latest security updates and features. But that’s nothing new, it’s a choice we all have to make whenever new software is released. But it’s probably not fair to complain if you decide not to.
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Sorry Steve but are you saying you find it quite acceptable to kill off Find My Friends for the benefits of the latest security updates?
That to me are two different topics. Whilst security is paramount and should always be brought in line with current ruling it shouldn’t be at the loss of an App that has a great use to many.
See my post number 55 above for the list of negatives. Thanks.
 
I find Find My Friends to be less accurate and take longer to locate than Find My Phone. I hope the new Find My will provide more accuracy in finding a device.
 
Beards said:
Sorry Steve but are you saying you find it quite acceptable to kill off Find My Friends for the benefits of the latest security updates?
That to me are two different topics. Whilst security is paramount and should always be brought in line with current ruling it shouldn’t be at the loss of an App that has a great use to many.
See my post number 55 above for the list of negatives. Thanks.
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With regards to availability on the watch, wait and see. We're at Beta 1.

With regards requiring the same AppleID. I haven't see any info from anybody that says this is a requirement. Again, we're at Beta 1, wait and see.

And in needing to upgrade to iOS 13, yes I consider this a fair trade off. iOS 13 supports four year old devices. If you have anything this old you're due for an upgrade. We lose functionality all the time if we don't upgrade, services change or are switched off all the time. I don't agree that development should be held back to ensure backwards compatibility for what is always a dwindling population, the four year cut off is reasonable.

Or you can choose not to upgrade.
 
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steve23094 said:
With regards to availability on the watch, wait and see. We're at Beta 1.

With regards requiring the same AppleID. I haven't see any info from anybody that says this is a requirement. Again, we're at Beta 1, wait and see.

And in needing to upgrade to iOS 13, yes I consider this a fair trade off. iOS 13 supports four year old devices. If you have anything this old you're due for an upgrade. We lose functionality all the time if we don't upgrade, services change or are switched off all the time. I don't agree that development should be held back to ensure backwards compatibility for what is always a dwindling population, the four year cut off is reasonable.

Or you can choose not to upgrade.
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Yes, Beta software is never to be treated as what is to come and I also agree development should never be held back but would hope not at the expense of software already held in use by many, for that there should be continuity or comprise.
I mention all the negatives only due to the fact to date there has not been any firm information to clear my queries. A few others have also raised the same/similar concerns. What is needed is Apple being forthright.
 
Didn’t I see this in a batman movie once?


(I didn’t come up with this observation, read it somewhere).
 
I’m confused like other folks about how many devices show.

On Find My Friends, you only saw the device the person was sharing from (I could share location with a family member or friend and they only see the shared device).

On Find My Phone, not only can you see all of your devices, but also all of the devices from anyone on your friends and family sharing. For me, this means dozens of devices that I don’t want to see if they all show up under the single “Find My”.

Does it show all friends and family devices or just the ones they are sharing from?
 
Fantastic, and somewhat scary - you do realize that this means that bluetooth is a perfect surveillance network

I bet Google will copy this, except without that whole encryption stuff... if they're not already doing it.

Imagine you have 1Bn devices world wide, and you can proximity track any other device from any device... thanks to chatty Bluetooth...

I will say - Find my iPhone has rescued my iPhone 8. My son was using it in school, then couldn't find it anymore. I saw it was at the school, locked it and played a sound - sound mostly because I thought maybe he has it in his backpack and just didn't see it, kids do that.

However, that wasn't the case. The phone was not with him. So I drove to the school, and was searching around the area, and couldn't find it. Going back and forth with the map, playing the sound, looking every conceivable place, nothing.

Then, I heard a very faint repeating sound (I didn't know how the find my iphone alert even sounds like).

Went to the source and found... a huge kitchen trash can! And there it was, buried under a bunch of trash.

Retracing how this could have happened, without Apple's thoughtful lost phone feature there's no way in hell we'd ever get this phone back.

He must have either left it somewhere or someone took it out of his bag, either way, someone picked up the phone. At the alert sound / lock, the would be thief got scared, and dumped the phone in the trash.
 
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m4mario said:
This is going to superbly frustrate law enforcers who think they have the right to invade individual citizens' privacy because they have power and good intensions.
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LOL. You have it exactly backwards. Why would law enforcement be frustrated by a technology that was designed to assist law enforcement and to lessen their frustration?? When your property gets stolen, often there is little they can do, but now you will be able to tell them where it is and the good guys/gals can go and arrest the bad guys/gals, and get your property back to you which is what they want to do.
 
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Hope the support in tv app ofr 4K on macs with 4K display will mean a lot more content in 4K. I have have had to by Ultra Blu Ray disks to get 4K content. When I use the current app to sync with itunes they only come up as HD currently. Very few movies are listed as 4K content on itunes compared to Ultra Blu Ray
 
Naming these apps “Find My” and “Find” is dumb. Integrate them into an app that already has that name: Finder.
 
Apple - this is just another thing I love you for. Thank you for doing this 100% private. Everything the hardware producer can be asked for, will be asked for. Think US, think China, think Russia, think Saudi, think your Ex!
 
[From "Wired".]
When you want to find your stolen laptop, you turn to your second Apple device—let's say an iPad—which contains both the same private key as the laptop and has generated the same series of rotating public keys. When you tap a button to find your laptop, the iPad uploads the same hash of the public key to Apple as an identifier, so that Apple can search through its millions upon millions of stored encrypted locations, and find the matching hash.
One complicating factor is that iPad's hash of the public key won't be the same as the one from your stolen laptop, since the public key has likely rotated many times since the stranger's iPhone picked it up. Apple didn't quite explain how this works.
But Johns Hopkins' Green points out that the iPad could upload a series of hashes of all its previous public keys, so that Apple could sort through them to pull out the previous location where the laptop was spotted.
​
Observation:
This has to work for millions upon millions of hashed reports to identify anonymously the target "find" device.

Question:
Due to the problem size, are the Apple servers subject to Denial of Service attacks?

[Just wondering how Apple will cull its database quickly and efficiently to avoid such attacks.]
 
So does the other device have to be on ios 13 to pick up that signal and know what to do with it? So would only apply to updated apple devices?
 
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