When your husband walks the dog in the middle of the nowhere and encounters no one during his walk, you can simply call your husband or you can track his phone to know where he is. Ever thought of it?
If doesn’t matter if only the school bus driver has the iPhone or if some kids on the bus also have iPhones (which you have no way of knowing if they do or not). Every iPhone on that bus will detect that the AirTag you planted on your child and will cease location updates because the AirTag will be moving along the same route. This is done intentionally to prevent stalking.
The example of you having left your bag in the friend’s car is a desperate attempt to come up with a contrived scenario from the get-go. Like you already put it so eloquently, you could just call your friend. And yes, women do keep their iPhones in their purses - like 99% do. So when you mentioned your purse and your husband, I assumed you were a woman. Sorry for my uncool traditional mindset. Now I see my mistake.
Apple warned of the AirTag not being suitable for tracking pets or people from DAY ONE. The fact you didn’t notice that warning when you were buying the AirTags doesn’t change the fact that they issued that warning BEFORE they started selling the AirTag.. By the way, if your husband encounters no one on his walks, it means that the AirTag is not a good device to track ANYTHING in your area. I guess you live in the middle of nowhere, so how do you expect your AirTag’s location to be reported altogether if there are no people around with iPhones?
If you go to town and walk into a few stores, visit a coffee shop, etc. and then drive back home (with your iPhone in your pocket) and realize that you left your purse somewhere in town, you can ABSOLUTELY track the AirTag with your iPhone. Your purse will be encountered by several iPhones (wherever you left it), so you will be getting regular updates about its location. You will be able to tell where you left it, drive back to town, and retrieve it.
The fact that the second level support couldn’t tell you how AirTags were supposed to work is not an indication that it’s a faulty device. Apple phone support people are not trained well. 99% of cases I report to Apple get unresolved. They are not trained on the products they are supposed to support. They don’t own those products themselves. If Apple support was competent, we wouldn’t be here.
The fact that you were never notified of the detected tag after you placed it at n Lost Mode was a malfunction. But your dog disappeared on August 1, and the tag was detected on August 11. So, even though you didn’t get the notification on August 11, your dog was long gone by then. I’m sure, though, that if you looked at the Find My app on August 11 or 12, you would have seen that the last location update of the AirTag was August 11.
We don’t know how the collar ended up 100’ from the house. Maybe it wasn’t there before August 11. Maybe whatever ate your dog brought the collar there on August 11. Bluetooth has a very limited range, so 100’ is probably the farthest Bluetooth 5 can even reach for your iPhone to be able to detect the tag at that distance. It’s likely that your dog didn’t get attacked 100’ away from your house. Additionally, you didn’t find any remains of your dog next to the collar. So, it’s likely that the place you found the collar is NOT the same place where your dog was attacked.
You are right that Apple do NOT advertise that the AirTag’s location won’t be reported by the same iPhone if it moves alongside the iPhone. If they did, I wouldn’t have spent hours trying to explain it in this thread. I arrived at this conclusion myself after having conducted my own tests. What Apple DID advertise was that they implemented anti-stalking measures in the AirTag without going into detail on how they did it. This is typical Apple.
I already contacted Apple support with the same concern you had before I arrived at my conclusions how the AirTag prevents stalking. My call to Apple was a waste of time. I agree with you that their support is incompetent when it comes to any degree of complexity of the issue you report to them.
Trying to explain to Apple Support how the AirTag works would be a total waste of my time. I already feel that I’m wasting my life trying to explain how the AirTag works on this forum, so doing it to Apple support would be even a bigger waste of time.
There is a huge difference between Apple support and Apple engineering. Apple support is incompetent. Apple engineering is very good, but they don’t talk directly to their customers.
Tile wouldn’t have helped you in your situation with the dog either. Also, no one prevents you from putting both the AirTag and the Tile on your dog’s collar.
Even though what happened to your dog is tragic, you should take responsibility for what happened because you tried to use the wrong technology to keep track of your dog.
