Android users are still vulnerable, and these announcements do nothing to reduce that. All a stalker needs to do, is remove the speaker. To detect a rogue AirTag, an Android owner needs to:

1) know AirTags exist (many obviously don't)

2) go out of their way to install Apple's Android AirTag scanner app (only 100k-500k worldwide have done so according to Google Play stats)

3) manually open the scanner app and scan, since it doesn't scan passively in the background; and even then, it won't help you find the speaker-less AirTag, since it doesn't tell you proximity & direction.

I continue to think Apple should have never released AirTags to the public, and should discontinue it. It's a very limited income stream, with limited use cases, and significantly increases the average person's risk of stalking.

Practically all positive social media coverage of AirTags involves someone tracking a stolen stolen items (car, bike). Those use cases are dead, since thieves with iPhones will get alerts, and most thieves with Android will know to scan for AirTags. And since most lost items turn into stolen items after a few hours, that removes most use cases involving losing objects in public.

That leaves "finding your keys within your home" as the only truly "officially supported" use case. Is that worth all the problems, and brand damage?

People will argue that stalkers could always buy trackers, but Apple increased their availability, ease-of-acquisition and ease-of-use by orders of magnitude. AirTags are cheaper than competing GPS trackers, most of which require subscriptions.

I remember seeing a chills-down-your-spine Apple Watch Series 7 TV ad, that featured beautiful remote nature landscapes, with the audio of 911 calls made from people's Apple Watches whose lives were saved by their Watch. Probably one of Apple's best and most impactful ad in the past decade. Compare that to AirTag's impact on Apple's brand. Why did Apple even bother?

> Android users are still vulnerable, and these announcements do nothing to reduce that.

I feel like this is ignoring the fact that if any company other than Apple made these trackers, it wouldn't do this with anyone's phones. The fact that these work out of the box with iPhones is a bonus, not an entitlement that any phone of any brand should have full support for them without installing any apps and without the user even knowing that the product exists.

> All a stalker needs to do, is remove the speaker.

I guess they could make the packaging more tamper resistant somehow, but again this is kind of shifting the goals a bit. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that every device will be physically resistant to modifications that would enhance illegal use. An iPhone with the speaker removed and screen cable cut to look dead would make a pretty good tracker too.

> AirTags are cheaper than competing GPS trackers, most of which require subscriptions.

If you are risking prison time to commit premeditated violence, I think you can spare a few extra bucks for the best technology available. I'm pretty sure professional hitman services run well into the trunk loaded with bags of cash territory.

Right, and Apple have provided everything that AOSP would need to implement this, someone even made their own version of the entire Find My client long ago (https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack), so technically AOSP could even integrate using Find My, although I imagine Apples lawyers would have a field day with this if they did.

Identifying the AirTags has also been implemented as a background service by the same organisation as above (https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard).

> I guess they could make the packaging more tamper resistant somehow, but again this is kind of shifting the goals a bit. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that every device will be physically resistant to modifications that would enhance illegal use. An iPhone with the speaker removed and screen cable cut to look dead would make a pretty good tracker too.

This. Plus, the noise AirTags make isn't the only way of finding them, you get the notifications, and soon (when the changes mentioned in the article are implemented) it'll be easier to find them using precision finding.