Apple Airtag, great success coming ?

Apple AirTag is expected being a sort of wireless token that we’ll can use to find things we care about. This token market didn’t explode yet due limits technology and applications had since now. “Tile” is a good example of.

Apple seems planning an entrance, using his diffusion, a new model of relaying signals and new wireless approach, will explode the sales. They want to copy the success they had with AirPods. Still not clearly evidence of which frequency Airtag will use but sound reasonable that on top of Bluetooth Apple should use some more efficient way and frequency to deliver signals.

If Airtag want to became another great success and overwhelm “Tile like” competitor we may expect they use also some UWB ISM frequency, as Lora or similar toys are using.

One of the limit Bluetooth solution has is related to deliver info usable for accurate geolocation, Airtag seems using other frequency and protocol, permitting not only to calculate approximate distance but also the angle of coming communication.

Feature like that will permit new iPhones starting the ones sold this year with UWB chip inside being capable of a greater level of service. As low UWB frequency will be, farther the signal will go.

Probably owner of 2019 and future coming 2020 Iphones may expect 2 different level of service compared the owner of older phones not having UWB chip on board.

Another game changer feature will be the capability to proxy to Apple signals coming from Airtag we found in the range of our phones. The way Apple has in mind to implement proxing the signal is not clear yet, we can imagine that permitting to relay Airtag signal to Apple servers will permit us too to identify our own Airtags using others relays. Often ISP has similar function, giving ones participating the club access to a common resource.

If a similar function will spread due the massive worldwide iPhone presence probably it will work also quite well. We can imagine that an Airtag signal intercepted by relays iPhones will permit not only to find them back but also to build a possible route to them .

If someone steal a car with an Airtag on board, every time the car get in range with an iPhone accepting to relay time and location (anonymously of course) of the finding it will transfer the data to Apple servers and from them to the legal user, that’s will make life difficult a lot of bad boys .

I truly believe that Tile like competitor will have a huge gap in term of technology and featuring and only a massive adoption of a similar technology by Android phones producer, today too much fragmented and low cooperatively may compete seriously all that.

Well played Airtag may be a greater success than AirPods where hardware, subscription and featuring will jump Apple again miles away other smartphone producer.

The thing not to forget is about our privacy, as usual, apparently free of cost, like Gmail we gave permission to read all our stuff, even here probably we will be inducted releasing some info about ourself and our habits willing to use/share the service. Our freedom got more and more limited by ourself choices. Unfortunately no government seems considering the power, giants companies processing all that data have. But this is another story will talk next in another comment. Airtag will come.