Google announced around a month ago that its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro have been designed to support offline finding through Android’s new Find My Device network and it seems like the Google Pixel 8a can do that too. The feature relies on the Bluetooth chip being supplied with reserve power even after the phone has been powered off or when it’s offline.
Mishaal Rahman (via Android Authority) spotted evidence in the Android API on Pixel 8a that’s responsible for offline finding. As per Rahman, Google set the system property “ro.bluetooth.finder.supported” to “true” on the device.
This system property is only set to true when a device supports Powered-Off Finding (name of the Android API for offline finding), which means the Pixel 8a also gets the same specialized hardware as Pixel 8 & 8 Pro that’s necessary for its Bluetooth chip to continue broadcasting the location of the device after it has been powered off.
One of the Google Help Centre pages says “For supported devices, like Pixel 8 series and up, if the device runs out of battery or is off, the Find My Device network can still locate the phone for several hours after it’s turned off.” That means you’ll have a good chance you can locate your phone even if it got lost or stolen hours ago.
Once you receive your Pixel 8a, you can enable offline finding on it by going to the Android Find My Device network settings and selecting either the “with network in all areas” option or the “with network in high-traffic areas only”. If you choose any of the other two options available, or turn off Bluetooth or location services, the feature would cease to work.
Google Pixel 8a supporting the offline finding feature isn’t a surprise considering it already borrows a lot of features from the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel 8, and gets the same Tensor G3 chip that powers those handsets. Once the network rolls out globally, users will easily be able to locate their Pixel 8, 8 Pro, 8a and possibly other devices also in the future quickly and without any inconvenience.
