Originally Posted by
EAJuggalo
When Airtags first came out there was no notification that everyone that had not disabled FindMy was being used to piggyback the tracking. That's why the user base is so much bigger for Apple. You can't disable tracking everyone else's stuff without losing the ability to track your own phone, laptop, tablet. How many Iphone users even now know that they are tracking everyone else's airtags for them? Half?
First, I agree with your general premise here, the integration made AirTag adoption much smoother.
However, you can have ‘Find My Phone’ working without using and supporting the larger locator mesh locator service. The later is a separate toggle to use the ’Find My network’, which can be toggled off. I am not certain as it’s been a few years, but I think it was still reasonably clear back when this first launched too (which is when I disabled the toggle).