While I’m willing to give them credit for shipping an Android version of the app, it has only just recently (like a month?) shipped while AirTags have been on the market for quite some time (like a year?). That is a pretty fair gap when nothing was available if you didn’t have some manner of Apple product.
I’m also mostly willing to chalk it up to incompetence at writing Android apps as opposed to any sort of malice, they did talk about having an Android app “coming soon” when they did the Air Tags product launch.
(note: all dates may be off by up to six years: this is the 2020s and my time sense has been badly hosed over by COVID-era isolation)
Ah, my mistake – I guess the first price I saw for the Tile a few years back lodged itself in my head. Of corse the price has come down over the last 5+ years because they aren’t Apple so price cuts are a feature of newer products!
I remember that…I actually did work for Apple at the time, and stories internally were SJ had met with Greenpeace and decided to “clean up shop”. GP heard nothing back, saw no announcements, and assumed no announcement from Apple was the same thing as no action (which to be fair most companies love to make press releases about what they are going to do, Apple is a rarity on doing it and then crowing about it after). Which is why a lot of the changes Apple made “after” all of GP’s noise were only a few months as opposed to a year+ that it normally takes to redesign substantial parts of products or at least manufacturing processes.
I don’t know if it was really true or not as I was not doing hardware design, or eating lunch with SJ (we did frequently stand “in line” at the same Sushi counter…and for some reason his lunch always came out first, no matter how long I had already been waiting). Given the timeframes though I think it is believable.
