Project to show AirTags on Android using FindMy.py

[parawanderer]

Hi,

I started the project OpenTagViewer that uses the FindMy.py library in an Android/Java app:

Video Demo	Demo: ☀️ Light Mode	Demo: 🌑 Dark Mode
app_demo_smallw.mp4

It uses Chaquopy to provide a bridge from Java to Python and back.

I think this might be the first public project that makes you able to see AirTag locations on Android

"Can I try this out now?"

Yes, check out the "How to Use" section of the README

Motivation

The aim of this is mainly personal use -- I have elderly family members who keep turning off their phones by accident and who don't speak the local language, who I've hooked up with some Samsung SmartTags to be able to find them back easily. But those don't update much.

Apple AirTags do actually update frequently, however they're in the Apple walled garden and barely anybody in my family who'd like to check in on said seniors uses Apple devices and/or has them on-hand 24/7.

So I wanted to give said seniors a physical keychain with both the Samsung tag and the Apple tag, that they can't turn off by accident, that they don't need to charge and that we can use to track their current location by in case they get lost etc.

Plans

So this is just a personal thing I wanted to throw together, but I figured there's more people out there that are bothered by the fact that even if they bought an actual apple iOS device, they can't track the AirTags without that device in any way.
In other words: screw Apple's walled garden.

The main things I'd like to do is make it usable for my use-case, as I already have the Samsung "SmartThings" app for my Samsung tags (which I believe are in their own walled garden, but that one isn't giving me issues at this moment).

So basically: live-update the location of the tags, and have a friendly UI for that.

[parawanderer]

Sidenote that I found a few bugs or mismatches with the FindMy.py documentation for some of the Location history fields and the actual values, e.g. the range of possible values being completely off (one example is the python doc saying a field can have a value in range 1-3 but the actual value being 100-something).

I will try to document these as bugs in this repo as I work on this app project.

[malmeloo]

Considering that the documentation is practically nonexistent at this point, I find that quite impressive 😅. But by all means feel free to report any mistakes.

[malmeloo]

This is really cool! I will add your project to the list in the readme. If you need anything in terms of specific features or fixes let me know.

[parawanderer]

Sure thing, will do! 😛

[parawanderer]

Hi @malmeloo , as an update I'm actually happy enough with the app now (I renamed the project to not have copyrighted words in it) that I'll probably distribute it to my inner circle at this point, and make a download more easily available on the github page.

It actually makes it pretty easy to investigate what is returned from the findmy.reports module of this library.

Here's an example of some of those fields that are mismatched to what is in the pythondocs, like for example the LocationReport.confidence field, which the pythondocs mention to be between 1 and 3, but these AirTags regularly have as 100+ values.

............................................................................	image	............................................................................

That's as reported from official AirTags

[malmeloo]

That looks sick! You're right about the confidence, not sure how that one slipped through. I'm still not entirely sure what the confidence means and what its actual range is, so if you have any ideas feel free to share.

I also totally did not forget to add your project to the readme 🙂; adding it right away.

[parawanderer]

I think there might be some relationship between the location being wayyy off on the map and the value of the confidence/accuracy.

• confidence seems to very regularly sit in the range 133-135 for the AirTags I have hanging off of my keys (It really loves the values 13x for whatever reason).
  • I have an example where this value goes 135 -> 7 -> 135 -> 7 a few times while I hung out at the same location, though
• accuracy sometimes drops to low values (e.g. 22) when there's a "spike" in the line to a wild side.
  • But not always, I have a few incorrect spikes with accuracy as a 80-90 range value today.
• I have yet to see any report that has description as anything other than found for the official AirTags
• status seems to nearly always be 16, however I have one report today for one airtag where it goes from

  description: found
  status: 16
  confidence: 135
  accuracy: 96
  time: xx:xx:13 

  to

  description: found
  status: 0
  confidence: 7
  accuracy: 102
  time: xx:xx:19

  And then back to

  description: found
  status: 16
  confidence: 135
  accuracy: 82
  time: xx:xx:23

Honestly, I'm curious if you could use these datapoints somehow to smoothen the drawn location history lines based on information like time between the reports etc. But I don't really have time to look into this much further as I have some other projects I'd like to work on and my personal use case is covered now

[parawanderer]

@malmeloo Btw I can't seem to get reports for my iPad at all. No idea if I am supposed to be able to get them for it, but the iPad shows up in the plist Beacon List and it has a privateKey, so it will get imported into the app just fine and seems compatible with the library in that I don't get any errors about feeding it the iPad's plist.

Now I don't really care about that since the thing is just sitting at home permanently, but from the current README I would have thought it would also be supported?

Though now that I think about it, I guess an iPad isn't an "iDevice"... Guess that's the designation for IoT stuff?

[parawanderer]

Oh and completely unrelated note, @malmeloo , but I saw you have this project: https://github.com/malmeloo/hass-FindMy

In my app, it's trying to fetch the latest 24 hours' location reports for all the separate official AirTags every 1 minute when the app is open, and I haven't been banned on my apple account in the last few days that I've been working on this. (And also, to be fair, I should probably improve the time range of that query)

So I'm curious, do you know what might be ban-worthy? Or is this confirmation that apparently this level of regularity is safe enough?

[malmeloo]

Thanks for those report dumps! Now I'm wondering if maybe the confidence is split into two values? The least significant bits of 135 and 7 are both 111, which seems a bit suspicious.

iPads are iDevices, and they should work, but it's probably broken right now due to #90.

I have no hard evidence on what could be ban-worthy other than personal experience with one account I had. I don't think there is a hard limit. But it's probably fine to have occasional bursty traffic since that's less suspicious and more like how the official FindMy app works (I think). The home assistant integration requests locations 24/7.