Originally Posted by
Need
I disabled Sidewalk on my Alexa account. I see no benefit of letting my neighbors use my internet or helping out Tile users. However, I kept "Find My" on for all of our iPhones and iPads. How else am I am going to do Find my Friends at the mall or fairground? I know there are people who would turn off "Find My", but I think for every one device that has it off, there would be 10,000 iDevices that left it on as default. I am sure a lot of people left Sidewalk on as well definitely much more than people who would turn it off. But you are still limited to area that has Amazon devices which is mostly homes. If you drop your keys with Tiles in a parking lot, you are still on the mercy of another person with Tile app installed on their phone walked by it. Even if you drop your key with Tile on the sidewalk (haha) outside of a home that has Sidewalk turned on, it would still heavily depends on the distance between the object to the Alexa device inside the house in order to locate it.
I ran games where the Tile trackers are “lost” in the woods and in fields and no Amazon Sidewalk devices could reasonably be expected to be around for probably at least one-fifth of a mile. I also ran the same games with AirTags. The TilePro trackers got “found” much faster and more easily than the AirTags even when using teams of 2 or 3 for Tile vs teams of 20+ for AirTags. In much higher trafficked areas with greater population density, AirTags’ advantages from the crowdsourcing network make up more for AirTags’ more limited broadcast/connectivity range than for the TilePro. Out in the boonies and no one else around except for me looking for the tracker? I would chose the TilePro each time over AirTag.
Apple’s AirTag anti-stalking thing is annoying some recipients of the anti-stalking alerts but even then people don’t seem to adjust their settings because of it on the iPhones. I would assume that Amazon Sidewalk devices also tend to have their settings set and then left at whichever setting was first in use or selected.