AirTags found when run on Mac, but not when run on Linux

[jsmif]

Describe the bug
I own some Apple AirTags. When I run toolBLEx on macOS, they are discovered. When I run toolBLEx on Linux, they are not.

Expected behavior
I would expect to see the same devices appear on Linux as on macOS.

To Reproduce
Run toolBLEx GUI on macOS and on Linux in the presence of Apple AirTags.

p.s. I would note that I never have seen the AirTag names listed before when scanning on Linux with "bluetoothctl scan on". So it's possible Apple does something non-standard on macOS (or that BlueZ does something wrong on Linux) that leads to this discrepancy naturally, and it's not a toolBLEx-specific issue. Nevertheless, it'd be good to know if this is actually a toolBLEx issue or not, and if not, why it's occurring.

[emericg]

Hi, thanks for bringing up this issue.
The problem is, I don't have AirTags to try and reproduce this issue, and they are not too popular where I live... I'm not sure that I can borrow one to test, or even detect some in the vicinity.

I have Apple devices though, they seem to be detected and shown with their MAC (well, periodically rotating randomly generated MAC) as names like this AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF on Linux and empty names on macOS. I gathered that was the iBeacon protocol, and some of them were phones/tablets and some were AirTags from neighbors, but I'm not so sure now ^^

It might be that they are just disabled with Bluez, I don't really have any information about this issue. Let's see if we can gather some feedback!

[jsmif]

The one thing that might be helpful for discovering some AirTags in your area is that all 4x of mine have the following GATT services:

Service Name: "Unknown Service"
Service UUID: {7DFC6000-7D1C-4951-86AA-8D9728F8D66C}

Service Name: "Unknown Service"
Service UUID: {7DFC7000-7D1C-4951-86AA-8D9728F8D66C}

Service Name: "Unknown Service"
Service UUID: {7DFC8000-7D1C-4951-86AA-8D9728F8D66C}

Service Name: "Unknown Service"
Service UUID: {7DFC9000-7D1C-4951-86AA-8D9728F8D66C}

So perhaps if you added a mode that tried to connect to and list the services of all discovered devices, you will find some in your area that match exactly those 4 UUIDs. (And as a side-note, I've been trying to find some BLE tool that can just dump all GATT info from all found devices, so that would be a welcome feature if you added it and a way to stream to a log file ;))