Find My Device might soon track your Android devices when they are turned off

Android’s ‘Find My Device’ feature could soon become even more useful thanks to a new option that could allow you to track your device even when it’s turned off, opening the doors to more use cases.

‘Find My Device’ is a system that allows you to know the location of your device on a map, whether it is a smartphone, a watch, a tablet, or even headphones. You can use the service both through the app and the website. Currently, the feature requires that the tracked device be turned on and have an active internet connection.

From ‘Find My Device’, you can also perform some useful actions to protect your personal data in case of theft or loss, such as locking your device with a message on the lockscreen and even wipe all storage remotely. You can even make it emit a loud sound if it is nearby.

That said, most of these possibilities disappear for offline devices, but this could soon change after the possible implementation of a ‘Find My Device network.’

Apple’s ‘Find My’ network is a system that, in addition to easily tracking online devices, includes an offline tracking system. This works with the billions of Apple devices around the world pinging each other via Bluetooth, creating a network that allows ‘Find My’ to determine their location even if they are not connected to the internet.

But what allows these devices to remain part of the offline network even when turned off? In the case of iPhones, they continue to power the Bluetooth chip for a few hours after turning them off, taking advantage of the fact that those chips tend to be very low-power hardware. That is, the Bluetooth chips can remain active even when there is not enough battery to turn on the device.

Well, it seems that Google will bring something similar to Pixel phones since after the launch of Android 14 QPR1 beta a few months ago, Android expert Mishaal Rahman enabled a prompt that appears when you turn off the phone saying ‘you can locate this phone with Find My Device even when powered off.’

This feature has been in development for several months since the first time we heard about it was in April thanks to the discovery of tipster Kuba Wojciechowski. However, the last time we heard about it was in September, and it was not implemented in the latest Pixel December Feature Drop update, so it seems there is still a lot of development ahead.

Also, although the feature was detected on a Pixel phone, it is possible that it will also reach more Android devices as it appears to be a general upgrade in ‘Find My Device’, although this is not yet confirmed.

Hopefully, it won’t take much longer for this option to arrive in Find My Device, since having the ability to track your device even when it is turned off is a big functional improvement.