After I saw third-party "10 year battery enclosure" offerings for AirTags, was wondering when other workaround customizations like this might appear.

Other impactful variants might be:

* senses whether another 'sibling' AirTag is present, if so, stays off. If not, waits X hours & then turns on.

* has its own motion sensor; only after X minutes of being stationary, it waits Y hours to turn on briefly

* has its own clock & (original-user-known) randomization seed; turns on at pseudorandom intervals the original user can predict

* low-power/low-bandwidth receivers so cheap & tiny now: could wait for national or even global unit-specific 'wake' request - perhaps even with parameters for duration/intervals – before powering-on AirTag portion

A while ago saw someone who was working in the tracking space said the following.

For stolen items you don't want to track them. You want to be able to ask them where they are. The advantage is you can make a locator that doesn't reveal itself by transmitting. And it doesn't waste power receiving gps signals. You could literally have a device that runs for years on a AA battery.

The reason you don't see these on the market is because the people that fund products want to sell location data.

Tile already has this feature. You need to pass verification to use it, but it stays undetectable. However, if you got caught stalking somebody you have to pay $1M fine.

Half-related question: the chip on the board looks like an STM32 microcontroller, wouldn't a 6-pin 8-bit PIC10 or similar µC be sufficient and cheaper for the purpose? And possibly use less power, a PIC10F322 in sleep mode with the watchdog timer enabled is around 0.5 µA, while a small STM32 is more in the 100 µA range in the best case.

Wouldn't this also greatly reduce the reliability of tracking, especially in rural areas where there might not always be a Find My network device nearby?

I think you should put an accelerometer on it, and only enable the tag a minute or two after it's completely stopped moving. That reduces the likelihood of an "it's following you" notification, as it's not really following you.

Add a normal tag so that the thief can find it.

Problems: if the thief steals your item while the AirTag is on, they can find and disable it.

Have you experimented with a setup (more complicated to package) where you have two AirTags and alternately power one at a time? Could that bypass apples detection whilst also broadcasting location?

Edit: at sufficiently small time durations to run under apples detection radar, but for long enough to be picked up as a location

I don’t know how Apple detects the tracking; this would easily be solved by them.

> Events outside our control, such as Apple updating the firmware in the future to prevent the device from working

There are several much cheaper nock offs that inherently will never update the firmware. Why not support those? And just to be sure, offer a package deal, include such tracker.

If its not foolproof, how do you provide any peace of mind that this actually works? Where do you get your 95% number from? If the stolen item isn't able to be found (ie the airtag was removed), do you provide some refund?

AirTags aren’t meant to get stolen items back. That just isn’t the use case. How does this compare to actual GPS trackers like https://monimoto.com/?

Very cool idea, and I love how compact it is!

My only feedback would be re: the site, specifically this part:

“ Airtag is a trademark registered by apple and we have nothing to do with apple.”

Might want to capitalize Apple; just a nitpick.

So glad you built this. I thought of this about three weeks ago, and wanted to try the concept out. Now I can just buy it.

A poor workaround to a problem created by unnecessary restrictions. Stalking is already illegal, so why are the tags crippled in the first place? This "feature" severely limits the usefulness of tags for tracking stolen items. Why not just sell some tags that don't alert everyone to their presence? Police and intelligence agencies have those already, so who are we protecting?

Can the time interval be changed by the user or is it hardcoded? What are the limits if they can be changed?

interesting project

> Events outside our control, such as Apple updating the firmware in the future to prevent the device from working, will not qualify for a refund.

I fully understand why you would want to do this, but as a consumer I would never buy this product with this clause.

You have also developed a device that allows people to use AirTags for stalking.