Apple’s Find My & Getting IOT Data to the Cloud
You are probably familiar with “Find my iPhone” - a tool provided by Apple to locate and play a sound on a missing iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, Apple Watch, or AirPods.
It looks like this:
How does Apple’s Find My service work?
Say I left my laptop on the bus, how would Apple’s Find My locate it?
First, it is important to understand it is not just keeping track of the last time my laptop was online (ie had WiFi access). Rather, the location is continually updated and sent to Apple’s servers via any nearby Apple device — one of the hundreds of millions of iPhones (and other Apple devices) around the world.
This means, when your iPhone is near my laptop, they securely communicate via bluetooth, and then your iPhone sends a message to Apple’s servers saying: “Bill’s laptop was seen at XYZ location at this time.” Read the full technical details here.
Think about that for a minute — this is science fiction — Apple has built a global mesh network that opportunistically connects to the cloud to enable secure and private, optional, opt-in tracking of devices.
Two weeks ago, Apple opened the Find My app and technology to 3rd parties. Meaning that if you want to build a device that can be located with the Find My technology — you are welcome to tap into the hundreds of millions of Apple devices that provide significant global coverage so your device can be found. Think about Tile Trackers
Tile is the obvious company that can tap into this tech to improve the value of their trackers (no longer would you need to be near it for it to work). Tile, is also the obvious competitor that is likely to either seize this opportunity or crushed by this development as Apple introduces their own trackers and enables any third party to flood the market with cheap clones.
But — I’m not here to talk about Tile or Apple’s future AirTags product — I think what we are really seeing with the Find My service is Phase I of a new service that Apple, Google or Samsung (or all 3) will roll out over the coming years.
Phase I: Enable 3rd parties to track objects - Where we are today in 2020
Imagine no more lost cats.
How? A small tracker on the collar that only needs the battery updated once a year. You can pull up an app/webpage to see the real time position and position history of your cat. I know I’d buy one of these for our dog immediately.
You might say, but Bill you can buy a pet tracker today — yes you can — but battery life is the main problem, needing to recharge frequently — and the data and data frequency you can get is restricted (again because of battery life).
Phase II: Provide a “free” way for IOT devices to get data up to the cloud
Internet of Things (IOT) has been the promised future for at least a decade — and while we have Smart Lights, Smart Locks, and all sorts of other gadgets inside the house — we largely haven’t seen IOT reach it’s real potential because, well, how do you get the data off the device when it isn’t near Wifi?
Of course you can use Twilio SuperSIM which will give you a SIM card to stick into the device and use the cellular network to send data up — but that increases the hardware cost of your device, while more importantly including an ongoing monthly costs for each device — the cell service.
The problem: How do IOT devices get their data up to the cloud. And further, how do you do that in a power efficient way — so that the device doesn’t have to be in range of WIFI and doesn’t need to be plugged in — instead running off a battery.
A solution: Apple’s Find My protocol. Today it is used to send very small amounts of location data up to the cloud — leveraging their distributed mesh network of hundreds of millions of devices. Tomorrow — the data being sent could be changed — allowing IOT devices to send their encrypted, private data up to the cloud.
The benefits are significant:
No on-going cost for cell service.
No hardware cost to support a modem
Not requiring each IOT developer to figure out how they get the data up to the cloud (THIS IS BIG! 10x reduction in complexity.)
Low power bluetooth (meaning longer battery life)
And over time this new IOT edge to cloud network would have a clear path for further improvement:
Open-source Bluetooth hardware (making it dead simple to integrate)
Open-source or license Apple’s U1 Chip - (location / spatial awareness)
Increase the size of the data transmitted or amount allowed for each IOT device
How? Apple has supreme negotiating leverage with the carriers — request / require them to allow each Apple device on their network to transmit certain data for “free” — as in not billed to the owner of the iPhone.
Increase the global coverage and what I will call frequency coverage of the network — sell or giveaway devices for people to put in their homes to pick-up and transmit IOT data via home wifi.
As we have seen, Apple developed an enormous business (~$50 billion gross in App sales in 2019) for developers and for themselves with the release of the iPhone App Store. A large part of this is that Apple made it possible and simple for a developer to focus on just building the App.
The opportunity for IOT is similar — build the IOT App Store — empowering developers by doing the hard stuff (solving the problem of getting data to the cloud, U1 chip design, developing a business model that allows for easy experimentation — access to the Find My Network for a cut of each device). All of this empowers developers to focus on their unique hardware + software idea.
Now — who can build this IOT network?
Apple, Google, or Samsung. Why? It requires significant coordination between hardware and software as well as enough distribution of the devices to make the distributed mesh network even possible. What other companies have the reach or the hardware to make this possible globally or within the US? I can see how there will be other winners in India and China respectively. I don’t see how an “open source” or FON style approach can work. And I don’t see how any company could afford to build out a significant network with access points given the uncertainty and time to profit.
I’m incredibly impressed by what Apple has built — even if they only use it for “Find My” functionality. The opportunity Apple has created for themselves by building a distributed mesh network — at scale — is incredible. This really is the opportunity of building both the hardware and the software — and of doing it at scale — meaning that a chip released in 2017 (the tech behind Find My), will be at mass adoption a few years later — as consumers upgrade their iPhones. Incredibly impressive
References:
Apple Find My support for 3rd party devices announcement: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21299712/apple-find-my-iphone-network-third-party-devices-support-location-tracking
Last week: Watch a movie in Fortnite w/ Friends
This week: Watch in Amazon Prime Video w/ Friends
Notes:
I don’t think this will catch-on — it is text chat. Better to put the movie on and call your friend.
I’d like to see them do text chat with random other people watching the same movie/show. Why? I think it would be like the audience watching a Streamer and chatting.
I love the experiment — a step into AR/VR.
Building a model rocket that lands like a SpaceX rocket
Wow. Step by step, showing the technology, explaining how it works, explaining the code and then seeing it fail, fail, fail and then work. I love this — he makes understanding how a SpaceX rocket can land — and shows that, all things considered, building something like this is relatively “easy” (over exaggeration!) and accessible. The video above is the sizzle reel — check the YouTube channel for the individual explanation videos.