About a year ago I saw them. In a dollar store equivelant in Greece. Apple compatible trackers for 3 bucks. Back then my tool of choice was PebbleBee trackers because they are rechargeable. But those set me back closer to 30-40 dollars.
“It’s worth buying an iPhone just for those cheap trackers!” said a friend who shares my passion for automation and using tech like this to make our lives better. He was kidding. But a few months later they started coming for Android too.
You can now get trackers for that ridiculously low price. And yes, rechargeable ones. All shapes and sizes. Flat ones for wallets, nice and thin. Round ones, others with clips, any and every variation you can imagine. Waterproof ones, others for pets, others for attaching to your car.
Apple had been outAndroided once again. Here is how it works:
- Apple comes out with a good product. They never actually invent anything or innovate. But they make a good all around solution for their platform. With total disregard to any existing effort of consortiums and other groups already trying to establish a standard.
- America sucks it up and buys the over priced Apple product. After all it’s the only market Apple dominates. Globally Android runs 8/10 phones. But the fact that Apple made a move forces everyone else to react. In this case Google managed to extract some consensus.
- Less complete, less easy to use alternative products start appearing and they ride on Apple marketing. The category existed, the tech existed but now finally the whole world knows the use-case thansk to Apple. You can say “it’s like an AirTag but for Droids.”
- The Android solution eventually (always) becomes much better, much cheaper, with many more options. Apple tries to tweak, upsell, market to their captive audience. In this case they start giving away AirTags much cheaper. Then they copy whatever innovation the Android world has made. Often they try to change the technology to make theirs incompatible on purpose. Getting harder to do now with the EU on their back though.
Theoretically the AirTag is still a great product. But it has a fatal flaw and that is that there are much fewer iPhones in the wild. I recently sat at an airport next to some jetset iPhone carriers. We were all looking at our tracking apps. Mine showed my bag accurately, theirs showed it still at the airport we took off from. It’s simple: baggage handlers are much less likely to afford an iPhone. There was no device to ping back the AirTag’s location.
Did Apple make money from AirTags? Sure they did. But their window of opportunity to milk the sheep in that walled garden is shrinking all the time.
(The video short that launched this post: it went viral at posting without me even telling anyone about it.)
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