The OnePlus 13 could get this handy trick for locating it

Google’s Find My Device service may have some issues, but it’s still a great tool to find your lost Android phone. It’s free, available out of the box, and has both an Android and a web client. However, it can only locate most phones when they’re powered on, as power is needed for phones to either triangulate their own location or broadcast beacons that other nearby devices can pick up on. Some phones are able to be located via Find My Device even when they’re powered off or out of battery, though, and it’s possible the OnePlus 13 may be among those devices.

The reason most Android phones aren’t able to be located via Find My Device when they’re powered off is because they stop supplying power to their Bluetooth chips when they shut down. The Bluetooth chip needs power so it can broadcast beacons to nearby devices. These beacons identify the device that’s broadcasting, which is what allows nearby hardware to tell Google approximately where your particular device is located. I’m oversimplifying how Find My Device works, of course, and I’m also leaving out some details like how it uses aggregation and encryption for better security and privacy. But I hope this helps you understand why most Android phones can’t be located when they’re powered off or out of battery.

To make Android phones findable even without primary power, device makers need to include specialized hardware that keeps the Bluetooth controller running for hours after the OS has shut down and the main battery is out of juice. They also need to add support for Powered Off Finding, the software feature that allows the Find My Device service to store precomputed beacons onto the Bluetooth controller while the phone is still powered on. That’s exactly what Google did with its Pixel 8 series and Pixel 9 series, and it’s looking like OnePlus might do the same for one of its devices, possibly the OnePlus 13.

When I updated my OnePlus 12 to the OxygenOS 15 beta, I noticed something interesting in the changelog that OnePlus provided. There was a line that said, “you can now locate your device even when it’s switched off, improving the likelihood of retrieving it if lost,” suggesting that the OnePlus 12 now supports Powered Off Finding — a line that has since been eliminated from the stable release’s changelog. In addition, the power menu (the screen that appears when you press and hold the power button) reported, “you can locate this phone with ‘Find My Device’ even when powered off,” further lending credence to the idea that the OnePlus 12 gained support for the feature after updating to OxygenOS 15.

However, the OnePlus 12 does not actually support Powered Off Finding. The device doesn’t declare the system property that tells the OS it supports the feature (ro.bluetooth.finder.supported), so Find My Device settings doesn’t mention that the feature is available. We reached out to OnePlus to ask the company if the OnePlus 12 actually does support the feature, and a spokesperson told us that “it will not be featured on the OnePlus 12 given that the OnePlus 12 features the 8650 platform, and this feature is not supported on this particular platform.”

The “8650 platform” in the statement refers to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the system-on-chip that powers the OnePlus 12. The OnePlus 13 is powered by the newer Snapdragon 8 Elite, though, and while OnePlus didn’t confirm if its new device or the chipset within it support Powered Off Finding, I asked Qualcomm a while back whether its FastConnect 7900 connectivity subsystem — its all-in-one Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and UWB chip — supports it. A spokesperson for Qualcomm told me that “‘Powered Off Finding’ is supported on FastConnect 7900 and like any other feature it’s up to OEMs to implement and use it.”

While we don’t know for sure whether the OnePlus 13 will support Powered Off Finding, I think there’s a decent chance it will, given what we’ve seen already in the OxygenOS 15 beta. There would be no point in OnePlus mentioning the feature at all in its changelog or including the notice in the power menu if none of its devices were to support the feature, and given that none of its current devices do, it’s a safe bet that one of its future handsets will. If so, Powered Off Finding will just be one of many new features in the OnePlus 13, which already launched in China but has yet to debut globally.