How we built the Find My Device network with user security and privacy in mind
In this technical retrospective (2024), @CharlesW shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 40 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 37 comments
It's a shame that the report server is hard-coded (well implied). Imagine if the device could advertise a report URL and then you could receive reports without a Google account.
The only thing that may be hard is forcing aggregation. However that could be accomplished with a Google "buffer" that holds messages until some threshold of reports for a given device is hit. Then it flushes them to the device owner's reporting server.
This would also allow more use cases such as logging device location over time as a server owned by me may be trusted enough to decrypt and index the location reports.
So secure that my Galaxy device refuses to use it. Is there something in the Samsung Ecosystem that disables the use of the core android one? I know I can use Samsung Smart things but the rest of my life is in the Google Ecosystem and I would prefer to be able to track my phone through that, especially as last time I needed it Samsung required me to 2FA with my phone to use find my device
And yet they couldn't agree with Apple on a protocol that could be implemented by both. Imagine how much better tracking you'd get with tags that could be picked up by either Android or iPhones. Especially in the _third world_ where Android phones are way more prevalent.
"We made it secure by making all of our android devices poll for your location constantly." (paraphrasing)
Sorry, I appreciate the writeup - I absolutely do not want my devices doing this. And of course it's on by default.
Is there a more technical writeup? How is the aggregation implemented?