Can you share AirTags with family members?

For those who want to provide feedback, you can do so by choosing "iCloud" in the iCloud section. And within "iCloud" under Feedback Type you have the options to choose:

• Family Sharing
• Find My Friends
• Find My iPhone, iPad, ....

which all could somewhat apply.

Cheers,

Chris

After finding out that the airtaga can only be registered to one device and does not show up under the family find my app I came up with the following solution as my bf and I constantly switch off cars.

all of our main keys like house, mailbox, work keys are attached to our own airtag via a clippable key ring… I find it easier to switch off the actual car key since the clips are easier to remove items then the standard key ring that you have to pry open to get keys on or off. So far this is the best solution I’ve come up with in the mean time. It’s easy for us because my SO is trained to put the keys on the key ring so we are able to switch out as we please. If we had a dog to track on the other hand not really sure that’d work the same way. Hoping they change this feature to share with family members in any case. Was honestly stunned they left this feature out and thought I set our family sharing up incorrectly. Anyways good luck out there.

I haven't seen anything in the documentation released so far to tell if that will be possible. It is kind of like an extended version of Find My iPhone, Find My iPad, etc. but the actual locating service is more like finding Airpods.

Limnos wrote:

They are associated with one Apple ID, not any particular hardware.

Agreed - they’re not associated with any particular hardware - but they are associated with the location of the iPhone possessor. That person appears to be notified about nearby AirTags regardless of the Apple ID of the AirTag owner.

Good question regarding Family Sharing.

So I delved into this a bit more for you and according to an interview that YouTuber Rene Ritchie had with Apple’s VP of iPhone Worldwide marketing, if an AirTag is being shared with an Apple ID within Family Sharing, the owner of the AirTag can disable the safety alerts to prevent their family or friends iPhone from detecting it as unwanted tracking.

In cases where an AirTag is being borrowed by an individual not in Family Sharing, the borrower can choose to disable the safety alerts.

Another nice to have would be notifications when a tag leaves or arrives in a location. So if the dog got out and ran down the street and was no longer near me or near home I would get an alert. Same for a tag in my car. I could see other uses such as tracking when something or someone gets somewhere (although you may be able someone by having a notification fro their iPhone)

Or imagine you want to track if something gets stolen so you want to know if it leaves "home" or leaves "work".

Is there even a notification if it gets out of range of your iPhone? I can't see anything to enable or disable this if there is

So I did some testing of the Tile Pro's today and my AirTags. The Tile Pro is 10X louder so you can hear them from a much greater distance? The bluetooth range on the Tiles are 3X better. And you can find tiles with phones that don't have U1. I was shocked to see a phone without a U1 can not even get general location information for an Air Tag. The ONLY thing they can do is play a sound. A tile can give you a hot or cold indication of how close you are to it that is great to bring you within five feet.

The AirTag is better within 5 feet but at that point the sounds would just find it anyway. So the U1 is far less useful than you would think. In the end I would say you would find an object in your house much faster with a tile then an AirTag. The only advantage AirTags have is that every iPhone will tell you the location of your tag.

I have the same issue with car keys. The wife and I share cars depending on who is taking the kids. I think I will hold off on getting air tags until these implementation shortcomings are hammered out. The value that it adds with lost objects will be lost in the annoyance of getting alerted often.

To suggest that the reason we can't share AirTags in our family is for Privacy is not logical. I can track family members iPhone and Apple Watch so I think being able to see where your car keys or the family remote is shouldn't be a problem.

I just received the 12 AirTags I ordered. There should be an option to assign an AirTag to a family ID so we can all see family things - keys, dog, backpack, etc. If one family member has something only they want to track, they can assign it to their own Apple ID.

So I'll assign "joint items" to my ID and my family will have to contact me if the item is lost but without the ultra wide band ability, I'll only be able to say the spare keys are in the house, good luck!

I hope they fix this soon!

well this sucks. I purchased them so that if someone stoke my bike or backpack it would track my items so i could get them back. If the person who stole them will get notified that there is a tracker they will look for it and remove it.

iniguez36 wrote:

If the person who stole them will get notified that there is a tracker they will look for it and remove it.

The thief can remove the tracking warning from his/her Apple device(s), but not the owner’s.

They are designed for tracking lost items, not stolen ones. If used for the latter, you have a brief window to get to it before the thieves know you’ve seen them digitally. But few police around the world are willing to use tracker info anyway to retrieve stolen property. Stick to list items and you’re safe.

Was a big Tile supporter before that company launched and have used it for years. But AirTag’s finder universe is so vastly bigger and you don’t have to throw AirTags away each year after the device expires (which started to do my head in). So I’ve switched the family over fully this weekend. I too am strongly hoping Apple will add “items” to its family sharing permissions in the next release, just the same way they do with “devices”.