Find My Off Phone

Find My is one of very useful features of the Apple ecosystem. The way it works is devices broadcast Bluetooth beacons that can be picked up by other devices that forward these beacons to the Apple cloud, after attaching location tags to the beacons. Thus, assuming there are random iOS devices close to your items, you can track the items globally.

A similar system is available in the Android ecosystem - the Find Hub. Just recently Google has upgraded the feature, allowing phones that are powered off, to be found. iPhones have had this since iPhone 11 (the U1 chip).

The idea is simple - continue broadcasting Bluetooth beacons even in the off mode. Bluetooth broadcast use almost no power, so this broadcasting could be almost indefinite. Maybe not literally indefinite, but at least couple of months. The Insta360 Go3s camera I lost when descending from Mt Aorai in October 2025, has come to life just recently (it has been 5 months now). It disappears for a couple of days and then reappears again. Meaning it has survived the rains and has not been flushed down too far from the trail path. And there still is some life in the battery. Whenever it pings me it feels like a little personal Pioneer 10 probe on the other side of the Universe.

I don't have plans to go there to pick it up anytime soon, but if someone is going to Tahiti, I'd be happy to share the location.