don't air tags use the same tech as Find My phone? Whether or not you have an air tag or are near one, I'd expect the same reduction if that feature is on.
Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
11–20 of 288 posts
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#12One possible explanation could be that the fallback for U1/UWB chips in devices without them sucks?
iPhones >=11 have UWB, iPads don't afaict.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec1e6108efd/...
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#13This seems annoying, especially as you don't get to control whether other people nearby have AirTags. OTOH you could use it to detect stealthy fake AirTags? :D
You can disable the Find My network, which is a separate option/setting from Find My for your specific device(s).
It's found under your iCloud Settings > Find My
The only major caveat to disabling it on your devices is it removes the ability for those devices to be located when they're turned off.
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#14It's an energy vampire.
Does having more airtags around cause the battery to drain faster? It would be absolutely hilarious to walk around with a pocket full of airtags and be a legit iphone energy vampire.
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#15Curious, none of my devices seem to be suffering like this with my air tags all over the house. I even have some very rarely used devices where “find my” doesn't show that much usage. Is this tied to a setting or bug?
I believe it was a bug that was resolved in one of the latest iOS 15 point releases.
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#16This seems annoying, especially as you don't get to control whether other people nearby have AirTags. OTOH you could use it to detect stealthy fake AirTags? :D
There could be a DoS attack vector - presumably a BLE-enabled microcontroller could technically emulate an infinite number of AirTags and drain the battery even more if not cause more serious problems. I wonder how quickly this would be fixed if someone were to sprinkle a few such microcontrollers around Apple Stores or offices.
All wireless protocols can be fairly trivially DoS'ed, due to the nature of finite bandwidth and power limits.
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#17An annoyance that is driving me away from the Apple ecosystem is the lack of choice when it comes to these new features - they are forced onto you with no way to disable them and sometimes radically modify the behavior of the device you purchased and may make it unsuitable for the original purpose you bought it for. I'm still using an iPhone and plan to get the new SE (and only because of Touch ID is back - Face ID w…
The Find My network can be opted out of in the settings [1]. And if I remember correctly, it asks you to opt in (but I might be remembering wrong)
I have somewhat the opposite opinion though that there are way too many settings in iOS now and it does get difficult to dive through all the menus. Best thing I can recommend is to use the search in the settings.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/725664/how-to-opt-out-of-apples-fi...
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#18This seems annoying, especially as you don't get to control whether other people nearby have AirTags. OTOH you could use it to detect stealthy fake AirTags? :D
You can disable the Find My network, which is a separate option/setting from Find My for your specific device(s). It's found under your iCloud Settings > Find My The only major caveat to disabling it on your devices is it removes the ability for those devices to be located when they're turned off.
Apple should separate the settings for FindMy the device / FindMy other devices.
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#19There are some battery draining tricks you can do with Bluetooth apps on a phone to drain the device batteries.
Essentially if you did a ton of device queries to every BLE device visible, you could drain the batteries of every device in range. Transmission is probably a heavier battery drain so just making them talk to your phone creates drain.
It’s a single device example, but in a bar once I was showing a co-worker once how you could see and interrogate a lot of BLE devices. I pinged someone’s Fitbit, and read that it only had 3% battery left. Then it vanished. I’m pretty sure in the process of asking it to give me the info, it drained the battery.
Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
There could be a DoS attack vector - presumably a BLE-enabled microcontroller could technically emulate an infinite number of AirTags and drain the battery even more if not cause more serious problems. I wonder how quickly this would be fixed if someone were to sprinkle a few such microcontrollers around Apple Stores or offices.
All wireless protocols can be fairly trivially DoS'ed, due to the nature of finite bandwidth and power limits.
However, do most wireless protocols cause listening devices to start using significantly more CPU and thus battery power? I'd expect DoS in most authenticated protocols to be impossible and essentially rejected at the hardware level (just like interference would be) with very minimal power impact.