Losing your phone is the absolute worst, but the next time you misplace your smartphone you might have a slightly improved chance of finding it. Google is reportedly working on a new feature for Find My Device that will allow you to locate your missing Pixel even if you lost track of it while it was powered off.
As revealed to 91Mobiles by tipster Kuba Wojciechowski, the feature may arrive branded as the “Pixel Power-off Finder.” For this to work, essentially what it will need to do is keep the Bluetooth on your device enabled at all times, even when your phone might not be otherwise powered on. That’s along the lines of how Apple handles the same trick on iPhones, so it’s not surprising that Google would do something similar.
The source code for Android 14 that was recently released to OEMs enrolled in the Early Access Program includes a new Hardware Abstraction Layer called hardware.google.bluetooth.power_off_finder that would make the magic happen.
That magic, perhaps obviously, does require some hardware support. We’re not entirely certain if existing Android devices on the market can support the feature, but we’d expect future devices (Pixels, at the very least) to come with hardware capable of handling it.
We’ve been hearing about the next generation of Find My Device for over a year now. The first indication of the service came in June 2021 when we learned that Google might be working on creating a tracking network of Android devices similar to Apple’s, which would allow you to pinpoint a lost phone’s location by taking advantage of the more than 3 billion Android devices located around the world.
Google teased the arrival of the network again in December, and in January it started rolling out a “Store recent location” toggle for Find My Device which would allow you to opt in to having your phone’s last location shared with Google. That would prompt your phone to share its location whenever the battery dipped below a certain level, giving you a bit of a head start if it happened to die before you realized it was missing.
There’s been no word from Google on when or if this powerful new tracking feature might debut. With Google I/O right around the corner, we might just be getting some answers soon.
