🚀 GitHub Milestone & Progress Update

[malmeloo]

I'm not usually the kind of person to make announcements like this, but I'm making an exception here. Because today we reached a major milestone:

FindMy.py has reached 🌟 THREE THOUSAND STARS 🌟 on GitHub!

I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for all of the support. FindMy.py started out as a library that I made to get custom AirTags working in Home Assistant, but it's grown to become the de-facto library that people use to interface with FindMy. I use Github as a platform to share my little personal projects with the rest of the world, and my intention for FindMy.py was no different.

But somehow, this little project caught on. A lot. I still remember checking the repository one day and thinking "huh, that's strange, GitHub must be having issues today." Except GitHub was in fact working perfectly. My repository simply gained 1000+ stars overnight, completely organically. Turns out, someone submitted it to Hacker News, where it shot up to the front page within 1.5 hours and sat there for longer than a day. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see the submission at its peak myself, but I'll make sure to frame a snapshot of the HN front page and hang it on the wall some day.

I still can't believe it's only been a little over 2 years since the first commit. In those years, 20 different people helped make almost 500 commits to the main branch. At least 13 awesome open-source derivate projects (that I know of) were created using FindMy.py. Multiple companies are either using or planning on using FindMy.py in their business operations. I have received multiple job offers, and many people have sent me monetary donations - some small, some way too large, but all equally appreciated. And, maybe most importantly, many companies now consider my GitHub profile to be important enough to sign me up to their services without my consent! Ah, what a world we live in.

In all seriousness, I am incredibly grateful for all the support that FindMy.py has received over the years. To everyone who starred the project, contributed to it, donated to it, used it, or just glanced over it - thank you, it means a lot.

So, with all of that history talk out of the way, I think it's only fair to give you some things to look forward to. I know the repository hasn't seen much activity lately - unfortunately, life has determined that I need to focus on other things for a while - but there are multiple awesome features in the making. In no particular order:

• Macless AirTag dumping is closer to a proof of concept than ever! There is, I think, just one technical hurdle left to overcome. That hurdle is a fairly big one however, and depending on how it goes, there may or may not be some strings attached to the final solution. Time will tell.
• I have been working on upgrading the remote Anisette provider to support the Anisette V3 protocol. This allows you to use a remote server while keeping account state on-device, which should mean no more authentication issues. Local anisette has proven to work quite well and will stick around, but it can be slower and some people have run into problems with certain CPU architectures.
• On a similar note, I have made a custom remote Anisette server that will be used as the default server in FindMy.py. This server will not generate Anisette data itself, but will instead proxy the request to a random known-working server on the internet. It will be fully open source and hosted on a public cloud provider for transparency reasons. This provides an additional layer of privacy over using a regular public server and allows me to make server-side changes to combat breakages for you when an anisette is taken offline. Of course, it will still be possible to select your own server or even self-host one if you wish.
• Local Bluetooth communication with your AirTags is still planned! I made a proof of concept a few months ago, but it is having some issues on my Linux laptop. I have not yet tested it on other devices or OSes to see if that fixes the problem.
• FindMy.py is going to get a command-line interface at some point to make it easier to use for non-developers. I have not yet worked out the details of this.

Anyway, that's enough talking for now. Thank you all once again and here's to the next 3000 stars! 🚀

[Ze-J19]

Nice