How to Easily Share AirTags With iOS 17 – CNET [CNET]

With iOS 17, you can share your AirTags with others, something they’ve never been able to do before.

When Apple released iOS 17 on Sept. 18, it introduced a lot of new features and improvements to your iPhone, like Live Stickers and offline maps. One of the more helpful new features Apple introduced in iOS 17 is the ability to share AirTags with up to five people. That means you can share AirTags for communal items, like luggage, so more people can track and help you find items if they are lost.

Apple released AirTags in 2021 as a way to help people keep track of their valuable items, like your keys when your couch eats them. However, AirTags could be attached to only one user at a time. Until now, you couldn’t lend someone an AirTag to borrow, and if you traveled with someone who had an AirTag, you would be notified that you’re traveling with an unidentified AirTag. But that changed with iOS 17.

Here’s how to share AirTags so more people can easily find your valuable items.

How to share AirTags

1. Open the Find My app.
2. Tap Items across the bottom of your screen.
3. Tap the AirTag you want to share with others.
4. Tap Add Person under Share This AirTag.

Your iPhone will show you a prompt that says once you’ve shared an AirTag, the people you’ve shared it with will be able to locate it and those same people will also not receive unidentified tracking notifications. Tap Continue and then you’ll be able to choose who to share the AirTag with. 

Once you’ve shared the AirTag, the other person will receive a notification to add it. All they need to do is tap the notification’s Add button, which adds the tag to their Find My app.

If you’re going through this process and receive a notification for a shared AirTag you don’t recognize, there’s an option to tap Don’t Add. 

How to stop sharing AirTags

If you lent your AirTag to a family member or friend to use and they return it, you can stop sharing your AirTag with them. Here’s how.

1. Open the Find My app.
2. Tap Items across the bottom of your screen.
3. Tap the AirTag you want to stop sharing.
4. Tap the name of the person you want to stop sharing the AirTag with.
5. Tap Remove.

Your iPhone will show another prompt saying that the person won’t be able to locate your item and they will instead receive unidentified tracking notifications. Tap Stop Sharing and you’re set. 

For more, here’s my review of iOS 17, the iOS 17 cheat sheet and how to download iOS 17.