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 lists of ten tips that never say which situation each tip applies to. None of them mention the thing that actually solves most searches: earbuds people believe are off are usually still broadcasting, and a scan finds them in seconds.

That is what these guides are built around. Work out what state your device is in, which takes about a minute, then use the method that fits it — walk the signal if it is broadcasting, work from its last known location if it is not. Specific, in order, and written for someone standing in a room holding a phone.

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 will not show you a direction arrow, because a single phone antenna measures how strong a signal is rather than where it came from. What it does is make the warmer/colder method fast and readable, which is the technique that actually finds things.

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.