Rita El Khoury/Android Authority
TL;DR
- It appears that Google is preparing a new “People Finding” mode for the Find Hub that works when you’re near the person you’re looking for.
- It’s possible it could be a short-range directional device similar to Apple’s Precision Finding.
- It is not yet clear whether UWB support will be a requirement on both phones.
About a year ago, Google gave Find Hub (then still Find My Device) a major upgrade, expanding its location tools from hardware to also letting you find people. It works similarly to Google Maps location sharing, displaying the locations of friends and family as points on a map. It may already be quite useful, but now it looks like Google is preparing to make a major improvement to this tool.
Looking at the changes present in Google Play Services version 26.20.30 beta, we are seeing some new text strings that reference the “People Finding” feature:
code
People Finding Started
Your friend is nearby and searching for you. Tap to see location sharing settings.
%1$s is looking for you Besides being interested in that new People Finding label, we’re also curious about the terminology being used to talk about this feature. Instead of just finding you wherever friends are, it specifically accesses “nearby” language – and that could be a clue.
Don’t want to miss the best of Android Authority?
If you’re an iPhone user, you’re probably familiar with Apple’s perfect searchWhich, in addition to letting you see your friend’s location on the map, also provides a live, directional arrow when you’re nearby, pointing you to exactly where your friend is. This certainly sounds a lot like what Google is talking about in this Play Services update for people to find.
Even if that’s exactly what we’re looking at here, we still have at least one big question: what hardware would such a device actually use? Bluetooth would certainly make this more accessible, but UWB may provide more precise guidance. The bigger problem is that UWB is still a niche feature, available only on high-end handsets.
assembledebug/androidauthority
At the moment, we don’t have a single strong piece of evidence pointing either way. We see mentions of “exact-search,” “location_sharing,” and “ranging” in the various code snippets attached to the strings above, and “ranging” in particular definitely evokes the feature set of UWB. We would say that it is likely that people are looking for supports UWB, but it is or not Demand remains to be seen.
It feels like there’s plenty of potential for Google to close the gap with Apple on its precise location tools for tracking your friends – but right now, we’ve yet to see the full picture on features and requirements, so we might not want to get too ahead of ourselves. We’ll keep poking around for any further signs of how People Findings is shaping up.
⚠️ One tearing apk Helps to predict future features of a service based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to the public release.
Thank you for being a part of our community. Please read our comment policy before posting.
