Is there any way to track apple airtags via Home Assistant?

I didnā€™t see this having been mentioned in the thread, so just wanted to point out that when youā€™re running ā€œFind Myā€ with the intention of tracking ā€œitemsā€ (such as AirTags) the version of ā€œFind Myā€-app needs to be one that actually supports tracking them.

For example, the version that shipped with MacOS Catalina does not support tracking items (only devices and people) and thus canā€™t be used ā€¦ so you canā€™t simply grab any old old hardware and expect to be able to use that for this purpose since Apple doesnā€™t allow installing latest versions of the operating system on too old hardware. I have not tried using a version of ā€œFind Myā€ from a newer OS on an older machine - which could work in theory, but Iā€™m afraid that Apple may have limited running the software on older OS-versions ā€¦ or it may rely on something that is not available on those versions or something.

In retrospect this does make sense, but caused a minor ā€œwhy isnā€™t it working at all?ā€ -confusion for me for a while.

Anyone have any idea if the new iOS 17 ability to share Airtags with family could provide easier ways to do this soon?

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@ndbroadbent Iā€™m trying to get MACOS running on proxmox too and keep getting stuck in the Ventura installer at the 12 mins to go markā€¦ Did you get that problem?

Update: I was fortunately able to test on another server and it made further progress by not stopping at the 12 min mark (all steps followed exactly the same). Turns out that putting the MacOSā€™s disk onto a NVME drive causes the 12 min mark issue. If anyone is experiencing this problem I suggest trying the install steps on a different Proxmox Server hardware to see if it makes any difference for you.

For anyoneā€™s benefit I followed this guide which despite the robot voice (the author is likely from Vietnam) was very easy to follow and weā€™ll explained https://youtu.be/iVolaiH-6W8?si=ICbau9w1YbP2Mq8B

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Hey @muehlt and @ndbroadbent I too have started using the muehlt / home-assistant-findmy script.

Iā€™ve observed that any devices with an apostrophe (i.e. Johnā€™s AirTag) does not automatically get added as a device tracker to Home Assistantā€™s MQTT auto discover. Devices without an apostrophe get added fine (i.e. Johns AirTag). The homeassistant documentation is allowing to manually add the device successfully: MQTT Device Tracker - Home Assistant

Can you confirm if youā€™re also getting this behaviour and if thereā€™s a manual workaround that does not require renaming device names on the Apple account? (Note: Iā€™m aware that removing apostrophes from the apple name is the easiest solution for me at the moment)

Hi @sebdoan, yes I ran into that issue with single quotes and hash characters, and I opened a PR to fix it: Remove hash from device ID to avoid ValueError: Publish topic cannot contain wildcards. by ndbroadbent Ā· Pull Request #13 Ā· muehlt/home-assistant-findmy Ā· GitHub

It was merged in, so you should run ā€œgit pullā€ to fetch the latest changes and try again

What do you think about this? iCloud3 v3 iDevice Tracker - Version 3 Prerelease version is now available

No. AirTags are not located like an iPhone, iPad or other network type devices. They use low energy Bluetooth to provide location info back to Apple. Apple does not make this available to web base location trackers

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Unfortunately, life is getting in the way at the moment, so I havenā€™t had the time to test the new release as much as I liked. But you can use the code on GitHub as @ndbroadbent mentioned, if you like :slight_smile:.

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With the release of iOS 17 AirTag locations are now shareable to others, is it possible the API set is now available to be able to track in HA?

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You canā€™t just share them with any old account, you have to be sharing them with an email or phone number that is associated with an Apple ID. The recipient must be running 17+ on the iOS device otherwise it will give you an error telling you you cannot share it to them. Your device must also be running 17+ or the option doesnā€™t even appear.

In theory somebody could host a couple Apple ID emails on a server then build a web application where you can give them a publicly accessible webhook that points to your home assistant server and share your air tags with them. The server would collect the information of the air tags and forward it back to your home assistant server through the webhook. Sounds very doable. You just have to trust them with all of your location dataā€¦ This would only work when youā€™re Internet is accessible, no offline support.

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Oh wow, thank you for making this, i stalled on my own script a while ago, and seeing someone else pick this up and package it properly makes me very happy, good going! :3

Thatā€™s a great idea. I would make a donation for it.

I would love to do this but unfortunately not that tech savvy :confused:

Does anyone know of a beginner friendly guide to set up macOS in a VM on my DS423+? Is it even possible?? All I would run on it would be findmysync

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I would definitely vouch for it! We have 2 Iphones, an Ipad, 2 Apple watches and 4 AirTags for the kids. It would definitely be a quality of life improvement when we could track those devices and of course our kids (when they are away) ā€¦ 1, 2,5 and 5 years old. We can do that on our phones ofc, but this would be awesome.

Iā€™ve a running Proxmox 4 node CEPH cluster hosting some Unbuntu docker hosts to provide containers including home bridge, I could host an extra MACOS VM maybe, but I rather like/want a more native way.

Cheers
Danny

I think this approach may help :smiley:

I did a (German) Video Guide which uses a Proxmox VM and the App Findmy Sync.
Give it a try, I hope subtiles work for you

Youtube How To Guide Proxmox to FindMy Sync

Cheers
Flo / Flotomation

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I digged through this whole thread. Current summary:

There are ways to get AirTag information to HA, but all those depend on having a Mac.

Is that correct or did I miss something?

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This approach does not: Airtag to HA via Shortcut

But problem from that approach is that you need a unlocked iPhone in order to get the data automatically updated.

Planning to run this on MacOS VM.

Is it possible to run this for multiple Apple IDs? Or does one need seperate VM for each family member and their tags? Or are new shared tags visible with this app?

Did this work out for you? Historically Iā€™ve had dicey luck logging in to my apple ID on VMed macOS. How did you do it?