Dropping your cellphone is absolutely the worst, however the subsequent time you misplace your smartphone you might need a barely improved likelihood of discovering it. Google is reportedly engaged on a brand new characteristic for Discover My Machine that may will let you find your lacking Pixel even if you happen to misplaced monitor of it whereas it was powered off.
As revealed to 91Mobiles by tipster Kuba Wojciechowski, the characteristic could arrive branded because the “Pixel Energy-off Finder.” For this to work, primarily what it might want to do is preserve the Bluetooth in your machine enabled always, even when your cellphone may not be in any other case powered on. That’s alongside the strains of how Apple handles the identical trick on iPhones, so it’s not shocking that Google would do one thing related.
The supply code for Android 14 that was not too long ago launched to OEMs enrolled within the Early Entry Program features a new {Hardware} Abstraction Layer known as {hardware}.google.bluetooth.power_off_finder that may make the magic occur.
That magic, maybe clearly, does require some {hardware} help. We’re not totally sure if current Android gadgets available on the market can help the characteristic, however we’d count on future gadgets (Pixels, on the very least) to return with {hardware} able to dealing with it.
We’ve been listening to concerning the subsequent era of Discover My Machine for over a 12 months now. The primary indication of the service got here in June 2021 after we discovered that Google may be engaged on making a monitoring community of Android gadgets much like Apple’s, which might will let you pinpoint a misplaced cellphone’s location by profiting from the greater than 3 billion Android gadgets positioned world wide.
Google teased the arrival of the community once more in December, and in January it began rolling out a “Retailer current location” toggle for Discover My Machine which might will let you decide in to having your cellphone’s final location shared with Google. That will immediate your cellphone to share its location each time the battery dipped under a sure stage, supplying you with a little bit of a head begin if it occurred to die earlier than you realized it was lacking.
There’s been no phrase from Google on when or if this highly effective new monitoring characteristic would possibly debut. With Google I/O proper across the nook, we’d simply be getting some solutions quickly.