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I thought unless an android or iPhone is beaconing, it only broadcasts ble on device wake?

Maybe I'm misremembering, but for example my esphome proxies in HA will show nothing for ages at night while my phone isn't being interacted with.

If the phone is lost, it's probably not super awake lol

Now turn it into a pervert-glasses detector and tracker

Make your phone alert when one walks into a room within several meters

Weirdly Apple seems to have something like this built-in for finding an apple TV remote - but the same flow doesn't appear to be launchable for any other device
20 years ago I meant to write something like this, but so friends could find each other nearby in places like clubs.
If you have multiple fixed BLE receivers, you can do full trilateration. This project integrates into Home Assistant using HA proxy BLE receivers to track phones moving around in your house: https://github.com/agittins/bermuda
When I lost my phone I put in one earbud and walked around the area listening for the connection sound.

Turns out it wasn't useful because someone else had taken it to lost and found within a few minutes of me losing it, before I knew I'd lost it. But it was a good idea.

Google is reportedly launching an airtag competitor tomorrow. I'm interested to see the details. I have a pair of their headphones, and they don't broadcast when the case is close, which makes them easy to loose.
Nice. I saw someone comment about this yesterday, and today, someone built it.

   This is not a Geiger counter, despite sounding a little like one.
I'm so glad they cleared that up!

Jokes aside, I thought BLE RSSI was too noisy to be accurate enough for something like this.

Apple uses similar for finding individual airpods (which don't have a UWB antenna), but it's also used in conjunction with the camera to map signal strength to 3d space.
macOS only (arm64 + x86_64)
Some many posts about this idea.

Is it just me that close bluetooth to not empty my battery?