Why an App?

Both Android and iPhone use a strategy of Bluetooth LE MAC address randomization for privacy. While this may not be a perfect solution, it means that the publicly-available bluetooth MAC address of your phone won’t be consistent. Thus, the need for an app to allow us to find the phone.

iOS / Watch OS Continuity Fingerprints

Apples devices emit various btle continuity messages. The most useful one is is the nearby info. The first byte is 0x10, the next byte is the length. I’ve found different devices often have a slightly different lengths, and some devices have a different txPower. The fingerprint apple:100?:*-* is often the one seen. Watches are usually obvious with a lower lengths and low txPower. Unfortunately if your household has many iPhones, eventually the nearby info will start to collide and lead to duplicate fingerprints. The Query setting can sometimes work around this by asking the phone for it’s model number or by using the room-assistant app.

iOS apps

Android apps

COVID Exposure Tracking

If none of the above is helping you uniquely identity your phone you can install a COVID Exposure tracker app on just the phone you want to track. Those beacons will be shown as exp:20. Unfortunetly we cannot use them to unqiuely identify your device if it is enabled on multiple devices. BUT, we can use the number of unique exp:20 ids to count the number of people that are in a room. Use the count settings to do this.

Add to the list

If you have a different BLE-enabled piece of hardware that you have gotten to work with this project, please let us know about it! You can click the edit this page in the footer.