You know the app Search My Friends? It’s the Search My iPhone? They are apps available for iOS which allow, respectively, to easily locate your friends / family and your own devices connected to your Apple ID. Thinking about security, they are basically essential apps today. Apple knows their importance and, apparently, is planning good news for both of them along with iOS 13.
Second Guilherme Rambo, of 9to5Mac (which turned on the turbo this week and keeps releasing information about future Apple systems, as we’ve seen here and here), Apple will merge the two applications – the new app, codenamed «GreenTorch», is already being tested by engineers.
According to people familiar with the development of this new app (who preferred to remain anonymous for obvious reasons), it will have the same features found today in Find My Friends (share location, receive notifications when a friend / family member leaves / reaches a location, etc.) and Find My iPhone (put devices in “Lost Mode”, “Play Sound” to find them, etc.) and will be available for both iOS and macOS – thanks to the “Marzipan Project”.
How, I don’t know, but Rambo said the new app will feature a new ability to find user devices called «Find Network», which will allow gadgets to be tracked even when they are not connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular network – I look forward to this feature to see if I can find my lost AirPods here at home. ?
In addition, Apple also wants users to be able to track any device (not just their Apple devices) using this new unified application. The company is working on new hardware, known only as B389 by the people involved in its development. This new product will be a tag that can be “glued” to anything.
THE tag it can then be paired with your Apple ID (in the AirPod configuration pattern, by approximation). After that, users can then receive notifications when the device is too far from the tag, preventing them from forgetting the item. Certain locations may also be added to a list of ignored locations, so that the item can be left without being notified (such as your own home, for example). The location of a tag it can also be shared with friends or family.
It will also be possible to store contact information in this tag, which can be read by any Apple device when it is placed in “Lost Mode”. The owner of the tag, then you will receive a notification when it is found – the idea, according to Rambo, is that Apple take advantage of Apple’s large number of active devices to create a network of crowdsourcing which helps its users to find any lost item.
It is not known when Apple plans to launch this product, but it could be announced in September, along with the new iPhones.
