Apple Didn’t Talk About It, But iOS 17 Includes AirTag and Find My Device Sharing

Did you catch Apple’s WWDC 23 keynote? At times it felt like the company read through tons of information and announcements too fast to make room to spend 40 minutes on the announcement and demonstrations of its augmented reality Vision Pro headset.

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For example, while covering the next major software update for the iPhone in iOS 17, we saw Apple rolling out changes to the Phone app, Messages, FaceTime, a new Journal app, and a few other improvements. It felt like the update was a little light on meaningful features.

Thankfully though, Apple Published an iOS 17 preview page Where the company tells about all the new features coming in the update. Sure there’s all that stuff included in the keynote, but then there are other nuggets of information like the fact that you can mark shared images as sensitive content and enforce how much amount the recipient has access to. Will contain NSFW blurb. Accept before viewing photo.

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Or you can take a picture of your plate of food and find similar recipes. Maps can now be downloaded for offline access, and Apple is adding EV charging stations to your route.

As I was browsing through all the features that Apple didn’t mention during the keynote, I found what it definitely should have announced. (To be fair, if you look at the image at the top of this post, Apple included it on the slide shown during the keynote.)

Starting with iOS 17, you can share airtag and Find My Network accessories, among five others. This is huge news and a feature that AirTag users have demanded since the tiny tracking devices’ launch.

For those who don’t understand or know, here’s why: Apple’s anti-stalking features will alert you whenever a Find My Device or AirTag that’s registered for someone else is traveling with you. This means that every time you borrow your partner’s car keys that have an AirTag on the keyring, you’re constantly getting notifications on your iPhone that you have an unknown AirTag with you.

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By making it possible to share the AirTag, you not only eliminate those pesky and annoying alerts, but you also make it possible for the people you share the AirTag with to track the lost item .

I think you’ll be able to share tags with anyone you’ve added to Apple Family Sharing, but I could be wrong. From a privacy perspective, this is what matters most.