Samsung’s SmartTags trackers and Galaxy Discover community supply comparable performance to Apple’s AirTags and Discover My community, together with precision discovering utilizing extremely wideband (UWB) radios. The draw back is that they solely work with Samsung Galaxy units. A free open-source app known as uTag (quick for Common Tag), developed by Kieron Quinn, lets Samsung’s SmartTags trackers work with Android units that run Android 11 or later.
Samsung’s SmartThings app, which is used to configure and management numerous sensible house units, is suitable with any Android or iOS machine. Nevertheless, the app features a software program verify, so to solely arrange a SmartTag tracker when the app is working on a Samsung Galaxy machine. Sure options of the SmartThings app — together with SmartThings Discover, which helps you to observe the situation of SmartTags on a map — additionally depend on software program that’s solely out there on Galaxy units by Samsung’s One UI person interface.
uTag replaces SmartThings’ monitoring and map performance with a companion Android app that replicates many of the options in Samsung’s apps. These embody notifications for when a Tag is left behind, sharing its location with others, triggering its ringtone, and viewing its location historical past.
Along with utilizing a SmartTag on a non-Galaxy machine, uTag is the “first tag monitoring app on non-Samsung units to assist exact monitoring” by UWB, in line with Quinn, which is a characteristic nonetheless not out there on Google’s Discover my Gadget app. uTag additionally consists of performance not provided by Samsung’s SmartThings app, resembling the flexibility to robotically scan periodically for unknown Tags, with notifications exhibiting the place one was detected. With the SmartThings app alone, scans for unknown Tags can solely be began manually, limiting the usefulness of the characteristic.
uTag is out there totally free by GitHub as a downloadable Android APK. The app will obtain and set up a modded model of SmartThings throughout setup that disables its machine checks for Galaxy {hardware} and permits the app to speak with uTag. You’ll additionally must register along with your Samsung account on the SmartThings app and on uTag in order that it has entry to mandatory Samsung APIs. There’s at all times a danger when signing in to 3rd get together apps, however for this reason Quinn has opted to launch uTag as an open supply app, permitting customers to see precisely what it’s doing with these credentials.
