iOS appears to only randomise the MAC address on boot, Android 8 (Oreo) and 9 (Pie) are still relatively new, prior to Pie manufacturers had to enable the functionality, it appears like with Pie this happens automatically. You can see from the Android docs this started with v6 Cambios en Android 6.0 | Android Developers it clearly states
When a device running Android 6.0 (API level 23) initiates a background Wi-Fi or Bluetooth scan, the operation is visible to external devices as originating from a randomized MAC address.
This obviously does not affect every Android device out there, because Android being what it is - some devices probably have the feature disabled by manufacturers, but some devices will have this feature turned on and it would explain why people above are reporting multiple non existent MAC addresses being reported.
It is worth noting however, that LE Privacy is a core part of the Bluetooth v4 spec, and as such while it may well work great right now (for some people), going forward more and more devices will report a different random MAC address when probing for devices.
Talked to google support about this. I told them I was interested in seeing all ble devices even the ones not activly scanning. Told them I want this for precense and they recommended me to send a feedback from Ghome with this request/feature for the devs to look at
random thought… What are your phone’s location settings set to? One of the options will use bluetooth and wifi. I have mine (One plus 5, oreo) set to “high accuracy” and it shows in scan results on the home without me having to scan anything from the phone. It might not be relevant, just an idea
I’ve previously used the BLEtracker to detect when we get home. I have BLE tags on our house keys to detect this. I setup the Google home detection but notice that the connection is very intermittent. Anyone else having this issue?
great news!
finally I can scan for BT devices without any stress to my RaspberryPi!
regarding the “combine all trackers to one” [bt/wifi/gps etc.] AFAIR there are plans to create a new “person” entity, which would combine all different device trackers used to locate people in the house
also - about the Google Home device tracker component itself - we need to have the possibility to enter couple of Google Home’s and to identify them. that would be great for room presence monitoring!
At the moment adding more than one device seems to completely cripple it. Everything slows down and there are a lot of timeout warnings. It’ll be good when it’s fixed though
So, testing this further, the Google Home Device Tracker seems to use Bluetooth LE, which the majority of phones only scan for when open, so it may not be useful for tracking phones. For BLE beacons, however, it seems to work just fine up to about 20 feet for a beacon that advertises once per second. If you have a beacon where the TX power is configurable, it can detect even further. So it seems the Google Home device tracker would mainly be useful for room-level detection of a BLE beacon that is on a person or a pet.
Enabling the regular bluetooth-tracker on a RPI that is right next to the Google Home works for tracking the Latest Android as well as iPhones reliably for a decent sized apartment, just like it did in the past.
Someone please correct me if this is not the case.
I did a little testing the other day as I was quite excited to see this component added in ( I have 4 GH around the house ).
I was disappointed when I couldn’t get my ble tag (nut) to detect at all, and my android phone only when I was actively scanning.
The poor detection and HA slowdown had me uninstalling the component shortly after
I was hoping to get this to work with my Pixel 2, but unfortunately HA only sees the device as home when the phone is in BT scanning mode. My HA instance runs on a rpi3 in my basement, which doesn’t make BT presence detection on the pi very useful. Utilizing the google home devices as BT trackers would be a great addition to my wifi presence detection.
So far this works great for my OnePlus 5T (much more reliably so than the rpi’s bluetooth tracking), but it won’t see my Huawei Watch, even if I actually have it paired to the ghome by bluetooth! It also doesn’t see my wife’s Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo at all.
It does however see dozens and dozens of other devices (every cable box, every laptop, and judging by the number of devices in known_devices now, I think every person who walks down the street). Too bad I can’t get the devices I actually care about!
Frustratingly, my Samsung S9 and my partners Xperia XZ2 only show up when actively scanning. Is there a way around this? Has anyone figured this out?
I’d move my HA off the RPI that’s dangling behind my living room TV and onto a VM in a heartbeat if it means using the Google Home’s to do bluetooth presence detection reliably.