Apple’s Tracker Detect App for Android Supports AirTags and Items on the Find My Network ⇥ cnet.com

Ian Sherr, CNet:

Apple has released a new Android app called Tracker Detect, designed to help people who don’t own iPhones or iPads to identify unexpected AirTags and other Find My network-equipped sensors that may be nearby.

The new app, which Apple released on the Google Play store Monday, is intended to help people look for item trackers compatible with Apple’s Find My network. “If you think someone is using AirTag or another device to track your location,” the app says, “you can scan to try to find it.”

I might be reading this wrong, but it seems like the selling points for Android users to download this app are:

1. They would like to help owners of AirTags and other Find My items find their stuff.

2. They think they may have a stalker.

Without undermining the seriousness of the second reason, it is not often a company launches a companion app to detect someone else’s misuse of its products. That is the main reason someone would keep this app on their phone, right? And it is not only Apple thinking about this; Tile will ship a similar feature next year.

Perhaps we will all need to download apps for products we do not use so that we are not victims of our location being tracked by some unauthorized person. But this does not really apply to “all” of us: women will be — and have been — targeted for stalking by beacons. I guess the market for high-tech key-finding devices is not going anywhere, so at the very least a universal anti-stalking measure should be part of the Bluetooth spec.