Google appears to be working on their own Find My mesh network for Android
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Apple has proven the power of the mesh network for locating items, and now there is some evidence Google is working on expanding its own Find My Device feature to emulate the same feature set as Apple’s Find My service.
9to5Google has torn down Google’s latest beta Play service release and found a new API for a feature called Spot, which, when enabled, produced a new a “Find My Device network” toggle that shows up within Android’s settings menu.
There is also some suggestion that Google will enable a mesh network, just like Apple, with strings that refer to helping find “other people’s devices.”
Further evidence is that Spot connects to the Eddystone protocol that Google previously used for “proximity beacon messages.”
It is not clear of Google will only use this service to find lost phones, or if they will offer a similar tag to Apple’s Airtag. In addition, it is not known if this service will be proprietary to Google or an open API other Android OEMs can use.
If Google emulates Apple closely, it could be a game-changer, given that the 3 billion Android devices form a much denser worldwide network than 1 billion iOS devices.
