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by sgtnoodle 1142 days ago
The off-brand ones lack a sufficiently large network to be used for tracking. They're only good for finding stuff in range of your own phone.
1 comments

What do you mean? They can use the same network of Apple devices.
How? Airtags only work because Apple uses any iPhone with BLE support as a detector, whether or not an app is installed. An off-brand BLE beacon would require an app to work at all, and I highly doubt Apple would make it easy for a third party app to run all the time in the background.
According to https://developer.apple.com/find-my/ manufacturers of third party hardware CAN leverage the iPhone BLE network to connect to the FindMy network.
That's pretty neat. I wonder, is the user experience any worse than using airtags? Or is it functionally the same?