About Find My Bluetooth

Find My Bluetooth is a small independent project about one narrow problem: finding the Bluetooth things that go missing around a house, a car or an office. We write the guides, and we are building an iOS app that automates the searching technique they describe.

Why the site exists

Search for how to find earbuds that are turned off and you will mostly get pages that avoid the question. Many imply that an app can locate a device with no battery, which is not true and wastes the reader’s evening. Others list ten tips without ever saying which situation each tip applies to.

We decided to write the opposite: state the limitation first, then spend the rest of the page on what genuinely works. A powered-off Bluetooth device transmits nothing and cannot be detected by anything. Saying so in the first paragraph is more useful than a page of hope, and it leaves room for the part that actually helps — working out whether your device is really off, and searching properly if it is.

How these guides are written

• Limitations first. If something cannot work, that goes at the top, not in a footnote.
• Grounded in how the radio behaves. Advertising intervals, RSSI and 2.4 GHz absorption are the reasons the advice takes the shape it does, and we explain them rather than asserting conclusions.
• Written for someone standing in a room. Steps you can follow while holding a phone and looking under a sofa, not background reading.
• Specific about device differences. AirPods, Galaxy Buds and a budget pair from a marketplace have genuinely different options, and we say which is which.
• Corrected when wrong. Manufacturer features change often. Every guide carries a last-updated date, and if you find something inaccurate we would like to know.

The app

Radar is an iPhone app that scans for nearby Bluetooth devices and shows a live signal-strength reading for each, so you can walk toward the one you are looking for. You can save the devices you care about — your earbuds, your speaker, your watch — so they are recognised immediately instead of being lost among the dozens of anonymous entries a normal scan turns up.

It does what the physics allows and nothing more. It cannot find a device with a flat battery, it does not claim to, and it will not show you an arrow, because a single phone antenna cannot measure direction. What it does is make the warmer/colder method fast and readable, which is the technique that actually finds things. It is currently in review and not yet available to download.

Independence

The guides recommend whatever works best for your situation, including Apple’s Find My, Samsung’s SmartThings Find and Google’s Find My Device — all of which beat a third-party scan when they apply, and we say so. There is no advantage to us in sending you to a worse method.

We take no payment for placement in these guides. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on the page in question. See also our privacy policy, which covers both the site and the app.