Finding a lost phone with Android 15 will get a lot better
If you want to find a phone that you’ve lost, you better hope that it still has enough battery to remain operational. But that could be solved in the upcoming Android 15 update where according to a report from Mishaal Rahman at Android Police, Google is working on a new feature for Android 15 that can help you find a lost phone even when it’s off.
How most lost phones are found is thanks to the use of Bluetooth. Bluetooth turns our phones into beacons that can ping off other devices so that an approximate location can be made. But when our phones are turned off, the Bluetooth controllers stop working.
With Android 15, it seems that Google is working on a “Powered Off Finding” feature that can locate a lost phone even when it has been turned off. It works by storing Bluetooth beacon data in the memory of the Bluetooth controller. This means that even if the phone is off, it can still broadcast Bluetooth signals to other devices nearby.
Before you get too excited, there is a chance that this could only apply to newer phones like the Pixel 9. This is because a device needs to have hardware level support for powering a Bluetooth controller when the rest of the phone is turned off. If a phone maker has not bothered to enable such a feature, it won’t work.
While this feature could potentially skip a lot of existing Android users, at the very least it will become a standard for future devices.