Long before the era of IoT and smart homes, people prefer to depend on themselves for solving regular household complications. But events like losing the keychain or umbrella are still ubiquitous which push us at our wit’s end.

The idea of tracking easy-to-lost objects efficiently is nothing new. US based Tile came up an handy solution: a tiny gizmo which needs to be attached with the item and a companion smartphone app for ‘ringing’ it.

The underlying technology is nothing but Bluetooth, but the smart guys of Tile used crowd GPS to make things smarter.

OnePlus and Tile share a complicated relationship. Many users started reporting issues with OnePlus phones and the trackers from Tile. The affected users experienced glitches in connection, particularly after upgrading to Android 9 Pie.

https://twitter.com/KellicTiger/status/1070719670867689472

https://twitter.com/jerrymilton/status/1078628929722830848

Both OnePlus 5 and 6, along with their ‘T’ variants are part of roster of affected phones. Tile and OnePlus were pointing fingers towards each other, and the saga did not stop.

Tile Trackers not working since Pie from oneplus

Does anyone who owns a Tile have any luck connecting? from oneplus

Annoyed users filed bug reports on OnePlus forums as well (example: here, here, here). T-Mobile was also notified as the carrier exclusive OnePlus 6T variant was not free from the problem.

FYI, there was a similar outage with Tile trackers in past. The buggy Bluetooth stack of Android 6.0.x Marshmallow was the offender then.

Meanwhile Tile publicly accused OnePlus for their buggy BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) implementation.

We have confirmed that OnePlus smartphones (5, 5T, 6 and 6T) have a Bluetooth compatibility issue which prevents them from connecting to certain Tile models: Tile Pro (2018), Tile Sport and Tile Style (2017). Kindly note that Tile Mate (2018 and 2016) and Tile Slim are unaffected by this issue.

We have directly linked this issue to the OnePlus smartphones; the affected Tiles will work just fine with non-OnePlus smartphones. The good news is that OnePlus can make a fix with a software update to the phones.

Later on, OnePlus kind of accepted that the bug was originated from their end. The fix should come as a part of end of January’s Open Beta builds, but those updates were pulled back as they started to brick phones.

oneplus_tile_fix_open_beta

Now Jeff. H, member of OnePlus Bug Hunter team, posted another update on the matter. OnePlus will roll out the fix along with the next stable update, at least for OnePlus 6(T).

Hi webhutch,

Greetings. This is Jeff from OnePlus Bug Hunters Team, thanks for your feedback.

We have added Tile devices for support on the next update, please wait for the update and check if it can work.

Thank you and have a nice day.

High regards,
OnePlus Bug Hunters

oneplus_tile_fix_stable

The post was made on last Saturday (2nd February, 2019), and no new update from OnePlus is released so far. PiunikaWeb is here to inform you about OnePlus OTA updates, so stay tuned and follow us!

BTW, has anyone seen my keyring?

PiunikaWeb is a unique initiative that mainly focuses on investigative journalism. This means we do a lot of hard work to come up with news stories that are either ‘exclusive,’ ‘breaking,’ or ‘curated’ in nature. Perhaps that’s the reason our work has been picked by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and more. Do take a tour of our website to get a feel of our work. And if you like what we do, stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) and other social media channels to receive timely updates on stories we publish.

Kingshuk De
896 Posts

I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.

Next article View Article

[Updated] Instagram crashing on all Android phones, but there are workarounds

Here's the crux of the article in video form: New updates are being added at the bottom of this story……. Original story from (June 5, 2018) follows: We're...
Jul 10, 2023 6 Min Read