You can lock your Mac automatically when you walk away with an Android phone in your pocket. It needs one extra step compared to an iPhone, and this guide walks through it. The catch is technical: proximity apps track devices by their Bluetooth Low Energy announcements, and Apple devices constantly announce themselves. Android phones don't. Out of the box, an Android phone is silent over BLE, and there is nothing for a Mac to track.
There is a way around it. Since version 1.40, ProximityLock can track AltBeacon transmissions, and an Android phone can emit those with a free app. Your phone becomes the key: walk away and your Mac locks, come back and it can unlock again.
Setup takes about five minutes.
What you need
- A Mac with ProximityLock installed
- An Android phone with the Beacon Scope app from the Play Store
Beacon Scope is the app I use and test with on a Google Pixel. Other beacon transmitter apps may work too, as long as they emit the AltBeacon format.
Step 1: Turn on a beacon on the phone
Install Beacon Scope, open the Transmit tab, and enable the AltBeacon sample transmitter. The format matters: pick AltBeacon, not iBeacon or Eddystone.
Step 2: Allow background usage
Android is aggressive about putting apps to sleep. For the beacon to keep transmitting while the phone sits in your pocket with the screen off, allow background battery usage for Beacon Scope in the app's battery settings.
Step 3: Pick the beacon in ProximityLock
Open ProximityLock on your Mac and hit Refresh in the device list. The beacon shows up with its vendor name and identifiers, something like "Radius Networks · 2f234454 · 1/2". Select it, set your proximity threshold, and you are done.
From here everything works the same as with an iPhone: the signal graph, detection modes, shortcuts on leave and return.
A note on address rotation
Android rotates its Bluetooth hardware address regularly for privacy. ProximityLock handles this by tracking the beacon's payload identity instead of the address, so the rotation doesn't break monitoring and you won't need to re-pair.
Questions
Android beacon support shipped as part of a larger reliability update. The release post covers what else changed. If something doesn't work on your phone, write to [email protected] or ask on Discord.