Seems unlikely but I’m very hopeful about Apple sneakily creating the world's largest mesh network. Slowly, but surely adding functionality to the mesh.<p>First, tiny packets piggy- backed through wifi/wireless carriers. Seamlessly sharing wifi passwords with friends.<p>Next, peer-peer downloads without any network. Specifically for sharing public, location sensitive, and cacheable data through UWB without any network involved. e.g. Apple Maps, Weather, News, Offline Translations, Stocks.<p>It seems even less likely Apple would expand the capability further, but maybe.<p>I hope they don’t open up the API though, or do a crazy good job to bake in privacy. It’ll be too easy to track people near each other. I’d be ok with an app permissions model of Wifi/Data XOR Mesh Data Transfer.
The ability to build on this seems to be limited to those in the MFi certification program. Likely means you can't roll your own, at least until third party chips/components that are certified become available for integrating into small-scale hardware projects.<p>Still, quite excited for new consumer accessories to support this.
Why hasn't Google or a large Android manufacturer been doing this for years?<p>BLE is not that young and and the contract tracing thing was executed extremely quickly and on the same technology (afaik, please correct).
The "find my" program is interesting to me because, for the first time (as far as I'm aware) it uses <i>your</i> devices to provide utility to <i>Apple</i> (to resell).<p>They remain serious about privacy, but there's still something invasive about it I think they've never done before and always seemed implicitly positioned against.
I'd love to chip a bunch of my belongings (camera, keys, ...) with this right away, but it seems there is no way to do that so far. I hope someone will release a product to do this; I doubt it'll get adopted all that widely otherwise. Not that many people are into Van Moof bikes.
Reminded me of this recent HN submission - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342504" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342504</a>
I always wondered why it is possible to simply switch off a stolen phone. If it would require the PIN to switch it off you have the remaining battery time to find your phone.
Wow, just learned this has an anti-stalking feature, which notifies you if a tag has been found in your vicinity and appears to be following you around. [1]<p>However, you only get a notification if you have an Apple device...so it's still possible to stalk someone using this technology if they're on Android.<p>1: <a href="https://youtu.be/kEhtM7YGSQc?t=656" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/kEhtM7YGSQc?t=656</a>
Once these tracking devices become small and cheap enough, secretly putting them on people is the next logical use case. This will be a stalker's dream come true.