Google’s Airtag competitor trackers are as unreliable as ever

I’ve been testing Chipolo and Pebblebee’s Google-compatible trackers ever since Google first launched its Find My Device network in May 2024. For eight months now, I’ve lugged them around, plus a bunch of their competitors, on every flight, train ride, outing, and activity, hoping to find the absolute best Bluetooth tracker out there. What started as a fun exercise of, “Hey, let me see if I can track my husband through a busy area in Paris,” quickly turned into a nightmare because of the sheer logistics of testing these.

I often had at least two or three phones in my pocket — sometimes four — with a bunch of testing scenarios, features to check, and environments to test in. I also had to enlist my husband’s help very often because I had to be physically separated from the “lost” item without losing it for real. Overall, I’ve tried these trackers in the UK, France, UAE, Lebanon, Belgium, Albania, Italy, and Portugal. When all was said and done, I had to comb through over 150 screenshots and dozens of videos. I’ve also delayed this article time and again because I wanted to give Google more time to roll out its network and redeem its disappointing performance. But time’s running out, and if there’s one verdict you need to know, it’s this:

But if you want the long, very long version, strap on your reading glasses and follow me across months of testing to see how Google’s Find My Device trackers compare to the Apple AirTag, Samsung Galaxy SmartTag2, and a bunch of Tile trackers, most notably the latest Tile Pro.

One of my first Google Find My Device network tests happened on my flight from Paris to Beirut and then back. In both airports, I did the same thing. I chucked all my trackers inside one suitcase and checked it in. Then, I walked away through security, passport check, and the duty-free area, keeping my eye on each app to see whether the tracker was showing its live location.

The Apple AirTag was the undeniable king, updating its location every two to five minutes on average — eight to 10 minutes tops. It’s understandable, given Apple’s multi-year headstart in the tracking network game and its devices’ pervasiveness all around the world.

The Tile Pro was the surprising second one in line — I wouldn’t have expected that from a tracker that requires you to install its own app to participate in the network — but it did update every 20 to 30 minutes. Samsung was a bit sluggish, updating every 30 to 40 minutes.

But the biggest disappointment came from my Pebblebee Tag on Google’s network. From 1:38 PM when I checked in my luggage until 3:50 PM when I boarded the plane, the tracker was not found. Just “last seen” at check-in, and that was it. I was in a very busy airport with hundreds of Android phones all around me; the tracker should’ve been found as it made its way through the airport’s backstage areas.

I’ve repeated this test at least five more times since then at various airports, and the result is almost always the same. There’s no uncrowning the Apple AirTag; it is always getting location updates every few minutes. Samsung has since redeemed itself, with updates every five to 10 minutes to the SmartTag2’s location in every airport I’ve tested it at, so much so that I think the result above was a fluke. Tile is hit and miss, depending on the brand’s popularity in each country; it was quite effective in the UK, for example, but not in Albania.

Google is definitely more miss than hit, no matter the tracker brand I’ve tried or country. On one trip, I may be surprised by swift updates every few minutes, only to be disappointed on the next five trips with a “last seen” time of several hours.

Test notes: Apple 10/10, Samsung 6/10, Tile 7/10, Google 2/10

Putting aside the network part of the equation, a Bluetooth tracker should be easy to find when it’s near you, right? So if I get on a plane and my luggage is loaded inside the same plane, I should be close enough to detect it as nearby, at least in theory.

Well, check the photo above. Tile, Samsung, and Apple all said my suitcase was near me, while Google was adamant I hadn’t been near the tracker for several minutes. If I hadn’t put all the trackers in the same suitcase with my own hands, I would’ve panicked and thought my luggage was left behind.

It took Google a few minutes to update its location and realize that, oh yeah, the tracker is nearby (see photo above). If it was only this one time, I would’ve chalked it off as a blip, but I’ve noticed this same behavior on many occasions. Even when I’m sitting at my desk with all trackers next to me, Google’s Find My Device app will often take a few seconds to a few minutes to realize the trackers are nearby.

Test notes: Apple 10/10, Samsung 10/10, Tile 10/10, Google 6/10.

Test 3: My tracker was lost in Paris; help me find it

After several failed and mitigated tests, I stopped my extensively documented tests and started using Google’s trackers randomly over a few months. I gave them a break until the end of November 2024, when I resumed testing to see if things had improved.

This time, I didn’t just keep an eye on their location; I actually marked these trackers as lost to see how well they’d respond to a close-to-real-life scenario of losing a valuable item. The process was simple: At night, I removed the batteries from all trackers, put them in a ziplock bag, and sent them with my husband to work on the next day. This way, I knew none of them had a headstart over the others in terms of network location. During his lunch break, I asked him to put the batteries back in and kept my eye on the clock. (FYI, he carries a Pixel phone without the Tile app installed, so neither Apple, Samsung, nor Tile have any advantage from his phone’s proximity. Ironically, the only tracker that should’ve had an advantage is the Google one because he has the Find My Device network enabled.)

And this is what happened:

• Apple AirTag: Battery in at 12:12 PM, found at 12:13 PM — delay: 1 minute
• Samsung Galaxy SmartTag2: Battery in at 12:13 PM, found at 12:14 PM — delay: 1 minute
• Tile Pro: Battery in at 12:16 PM, found at 6:11 PM — delay: 6 hours
• Chipolo ONE Point (Google tracker): Battery in at 12:08 PM, found… not — delay: indefinite

The below photo shows where things stood at 12:37 PM, about 20 minutes after we put the batteries inside the trackers. The Apple AirTag and Samsung Galaxy SmartTag2 on the left show the correct location on the eastern side of Paris, both updated a few minutes ago. The Tile Pro and the Chipolo tracker on the right show a location on the western side of Paris, at home, last updated many hours earlier, around 2 AM, when I had removed the batteries before going to sleep.

For the rest of the day, Apple’s and Samsung trackers went hand in hand, updating their location very accurately every few minutes. See for yourself in the screenshots below. This is one of the reasons I’m very pleased with Samsung’s tracker performance in general. It’s surprising how accurate and fast it is, giving Apple’s strong Find My network a run for its money. And it’s not just in Paris. In almost every country and location I’ve tested these two trackers, I’ve found that they go toe-to-toe with their performance and accuracy.

In comparison, Tile remains hit-and-miss. It works, but not as frequently or as quickly, because you’re exclusively relying on nearby Tile users to get the location of your lost item. As I said, the Tile Pro was found at 6:11 PM, and as my husband made his way home, it was still tracked and found a couple more times. A six-hour delay is not idea, but it’s better than the alternative…

… which is what happened with the Chipolo tracker. Nothing much changed from noon to 7 PM in the Find My Device app, even with my husband’s Pixel 7 Pro literally next to it and set to contribute to Find My Device “with network in all areas,” not just high-traffic ones. For seven hours, it didn’t update once, not even when he put it in his backpack with the other trackers on his way home and took the train with a bunch of other commuters.

This lasted until 7:56 PM when my husband returned home, and all the trackers were physically with me, near my phone. I’ll let you judge these screenshots.

It wasn’t until a few minutes later, at 8 PM, that I received the notification that my Chipolo tracker was found. Whew! Remember how I said, during my luggage on the airplane test, that Google’s trackers are often late to show as nearby even when they’re physically near me? Yup, this is the same issue, and it’s still one I struggle with to this day.

Test notes: Apple 10/10, Samsung 10/10, Tile 5/10, Google 0/10

Test 4: Second time’s the charm?

The next month, in December, I decided to run a very similar test again. This time, my husband took the batteries out at 9 AM when he reached work, left them out, and then only inserted them back in the trackers around 7 PM, as he was about to head back home.

In my many months with the AirTag and other Apple Find My-compatible trackers, this was the only time Apple’s network failed me. It kept showing a recent location (two minutes ago!) near my home on the western side of Paris when I knew the AirTag was far away with my husband on the eastern side of the city. I’m not really sure what happened here; there’s a red lock next to my keys (the AirTag), which usually means an error occurred. It got fixed by itself the next day, but that meant that the AirTag didn’t really work during this test. Proof that all good technology is fallible, I guess?

Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag2 did its thing immediately after being turned on. Tile didn’t update its location until half an hour later, only showing the morning’s last-seen location before that. But, surprisingly, the Chipolo ONE Point on Google’s network worked as expected!

This was the first time I actually saw Google’s estimated network location do its magic properly, showing me a recent and accurate location and keeping it updated for the whole time as my husband commuted back home. This test proves that there was nothing wrong with my trackers; it’s just that the network is so unreliable. Excellent one day, terrible the other.

However, keep in mind that I gave it the best chance at success because my husband manually enabled “in all network areas” on his Pixel 7 Pro’s Find My Device settings, not just in crowded places. Not everyone will do that on their phone, so the network’s success still relies on other people’s will to participate in it.

Test notes: Apple 0/10, Samsung 10/10, Tile 5/10, Google 10/10

Test 5: How fast are unknown tracker alerts when I’m being stalked?

Alright, let’s stop trying to find a lost item and start looking at some other features of these Bluetooth trackers, namely unknown tracker alerts and stalking protection.

Both Google and Apple have worked together to make sure their trackers and networks are interoperable, so if you have an unknown tracker (i.e. one that isn’t traveling with the phone it’s linked to) following you around, you should get a notification to alert you of its presence on your Android phone or iPhone. You can then ring it to try to identify it and verify if it’s stalking you or not.

To test this once again, my husband — the best test subject and most supportive partner in the world, I should say — commuted with the trackers a few times. Every time we tried this, the result was nearly the same. His Pixel phone would alert him about the AirTag traveling with him about one hour after he left home, with the tracker first seen nearly immediately after he’d left home and moved from my iPhone (the phone the tracker is linked to). That means that Android is noticing the disconnected tracker, keeping an eye on it for an hour to avoid any unnecessary false positives, and when it notices that there’s a pattern, it alerts him.

Google’s trackers often took a lot more time to trigger this notification. Sometimes, it went on for several hours; other times, he didn’t get any notification at all! The best-case scenario is shown above. He started walking away from my phones with the trackers in his backpack at 8:09 AM. The Pebblebee alert came at 10:16 AM, more than one hour after the AirTag at 9:09 AM (which already has a one-hour latency for false positives, as explained above). What baffles me here is that the Pebblebee was first detected at 8:26 AM, so not so long after the AirTag at 8:15 AM, but it didn’t ping the unknown alert until nearly two hours later. Why is Google waiting this long to notify people of danger? Why is the network and, thus, the alert so erratic? I don’t know.

Obviously, though, the biggest dealbreaker is with Samsung and Tile’s trackers. Both of them offer unknown alerts, but you have to have a Samsung phone with the SmartThings app installed and the setting enabled for the former, and the Tile app installed on your Android phone or iPhone for the latter. There’s no interoperability across platforms, nor is there a default alert system if you don’t take these steps, which the grand majority of people won’t do. They’re both a stalker’s dream and a normal human’s tech nightmare.

Test notes: Apple 9/10, Samsung 0/10, Tile 0/10, Google 6/10

Test 6: Tracking a shared tag traveling with a family member

For this test, I did things very simply. My husband and I have two shared Google-compatible trackers in each of our wallets. He can track mine; I can track his. We’re each other’s only support system in Paris, so this is a bit of a second-degree guarantee that we know our whereabouts if, heaven forbid, something goes wrong.

So, every few weeks, I’d let him know that I’d be checking his wallet’s location over the next hour or two and see if it was updating properly. I didn’t bother comparing Google’s trackers against the others here because I know those do their job — it’s one of the most basic features of a “find” network. I was happy to see that a shared Pebblebee tracker, connected to his phone, was a lot more responsive and reliable to track. In all of my tests, the location was always accurate and frequently updated (every five minutes tops). So if you want to get these trackers to keep an eye on a family member and you know they’ll always have their phone with them, you shouldn’t have any qualms. It works.

Test notes: Apple 10/10, Samsung 10/10, Tile 10/10, Google 10/10

Test 7: I lost my backpack in the most confusing mall in Dubai

Ah, Dragon Mart. The labyrinthine maze of impossibly narrow alleyways and a dizzying array of shops with its chaotic energy and organization. If there’s one mall in all of Dubai where you shouldn’t misplace your backpack, it’s this one. You have higher odds of winning the lottery than finding your way to anything in there.

I wanted to defy the odds, though, albeit while keeping some control. I gave my husband my backpack with the Apple AirTag, Samsung Galaxy SmartTag2, and Google-compatible Pebblebee Clip; I had forgotten to slip in the Tile Pro this time — oops! I asked my husband to walk around a bit so I wouldn’t know exactly in which direction my backpack was “lost,” and I walked around, too. After about 10 minutes of random wandering through the mall, I asked him to stop, and I tried to use the apps to find him and my backpack.

I looked at all three apps and noticed that the AirTag had the most recent location (one minute ago), the Galaxy SmartTag2 was five minutes off, and the Pebblebee (Google) was nine minutes out. But things quickly improved for Google and degraded for Samsung. A couple of minutes later, Google started updating its location and kept it updated the whole time while I was making my way over to my backpack, while the Galaxy SmartTag2 stopped updating. The last-seen location was still relatively accurate, but it wouldn’t have let me find my husband in that mall’s labyrinth. The AirTag, as (almost) always, was on point.

It took 10 minutes to make my way through the maze, alternating between the AirTag’s location and the Pebblebee’s location (which were the same) before I finally took a left turn and found my backpack — and my husband — standing there. The Galaxy tag was still stuck at last seen 15 minutes earlier. I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect Google’s network to work this well here in such a complicated setting, but I’ll give credit where it’s due. It did its thing, and it did it beautifully.

The one disappointing aspect of using Google’s app, though, was more of a UX problem. When Apple’s Find My displays your trackers, it also shows your location relative to them and in which direction you’re standing. That way, I could easily know if I was walking in the right direction and adjust course. Google’s app, on the other hand, doesn’t show me my current location. The only way to walk to a tracker was to start navigation and get directions in another app like Google Maps, which wanted me to get out of the mall, walk through the parking lot road, and then go back through another entrance.

Worse yet, since Google was giving me directions to the tracker in Maps, it was a static location. Luckily, I knew my husband was standing still, but if this was a theft situation, with my stolen backpack on the move, I would have to exit navigation every few minutes to get the tracker’s updated location and a new set of directions to it. Not good, Google. Apple, on the other hand, does offer directions through another app, but I could simply rely on the live view in Find My to make my way to my backpack.

Test notes: Apple 10/10, Samsung 3/10, Tile N/A, Google 8/10

For this very recent test, we went out of the busy and crowded areas to see how well these trackers behave in smaller towns. My husband and his friends were doing their New Year’s Eve run of grocery and food shopping for about two hours, and he carried the trackers with him. Once again, I marked them as lost and waited.

Google, Apple, and Samsung’s locations were quickly, constantly, and accurately updated over the course of these two hours of errands, although Samsung was a bit sluggish at one point and had a 20-minute delay. The Tile Pro was a bit more random; it failed to be found for the first hour when the errands were in smaller cheese and produce shops, but it was quickly spotted once my husband made his way to a supermarket in the middle of town.

Despite its stellar performance here, though, Google’s tracker had one big problem. Apple, Samsung, and Tile sent me a notification immediately when they were found. Google didn’t. You can see in the screenshots above that the tracker was seen as early as 5:41 PM, but no notification, no alert, no email, nothing came. I had to manually open the app to see if the tracker was updating its location. If I was a regular user and trusted the notification, I would’ve never known that my Pebblebee had been found, or I might’ve missed it by several hours.

Test notes: Apple 10/10, Samsung 8/10, Tile 5/10, Google 8/10

Test 9: Can I find a nearby tracker when I’m offline?

Speaking of basics, the most basic thing a Bluetooth tracker should do is actually be found on Bluetooth. Right? Right?

Cough. Google. Cough. RIGHT?

So picture this. I am in a spotty network area. Maybe I’m hiking, and my keys fell from my backpack; maybe I’m traveling, and I don’t have a solid connection. Maybe I’m even completely offline, but I still need to find a lost item. I open the apps to see my trackers, and I notice different behaviors.

Apple’s Find My app warns me I’m offline and that the Find My network isn’t accessible, but the app falls back to Bluetooth, and I can still see all my trackers. I can play sound on a nearby one and open the live-finding mode to detect it over UWB. Tile Pro doesn’t care that I’m offline, either. Everything in the app, bar the Tile network finding, still works, and I can ring my tracker to find it nearby. That’s the very principle of a Bluetooth tracker.

Samsung is a bit trickier. The app throws some warnings if I’m in airplane mode or completely disconnected, but still works even if I don’t have a network connection. I just have to make sure that Wi-Fi and data are enabled, even if they’re not connected, and I’m able to see my tracker nearby, ring it, find it live with the UWB search, and so on.

Google… well… Oh. See for yourself in the screenshots above. The entire Find My Device app doesn’t even load if I’m disconnected or in airplane mode. It’s such a depressingly bad failure.

Test notes: Apple 10/10, Samsung 7/10, Tile 10/10, Google 0/10

Test 10: I left my keys at home — can I get a reminder, please?

One of the most important use cases for a Bluetooth tracker are separation alerts, otherwise known as “left behind” notifications when you walk away from your most important items. Say you’re in a restaurant or a store and leave without your wallet, or you keep forgetting to take your keys with you when you leave home; you should get a notification to warn you of that before it’s too late and someone else has picked up your wallet, backpack, or keys, and walked away with them.

Apple, Samsung, and Tile offer this feature. Google’s Find My Device implementation doesn’t, which means that I can’t clip a Pebblebee Clip on my keys and be warned each time I walk away from them. Still, I wanted to test out how the others perform and if this function is fast enough to be useful.

All three companies include the left-behind setting in their apps, but you’ll have to subscribe to Tile’s Premium plan at $2.99 a month to be able to use it. A bit of a shame because Apple and Samsung offer this for free, but a small company’s gotta do what it needs to in order to survive. I’m still deducing points from Tile’s note for this, though.

All three trackers also allow me to set safe zones where I can leave items without being warned about walking away. Home is an easy one because I can often leave without my backpack, and I don’t want to be bombarded by notifications about it. For my keys, though, I’d rather remove all safe zones because I don’t want to leave home without them.

To test this, I left home at 9:44 AM with my iPhone 13 Pro Max, Galaxy S24 Ultra, and Pixel 9 Pro. I purposely left all the trackers behind and walked away. I was only a few dozen feet away when I got the notification on the S24 Ultra about my disconnected Galay SmartTag2. Tile followed soon after; I was still walking out of the building at that point. And the iPhone remained surprisingly silent. It was freezing cold, so I put it back in my pocket and dashed to the train station. A few minutes later, I checked it out and lo-and-behold, the notification had arrived, two minutes later than Samsung and three after I’d left home.

I’ve done this a few times since then, and the results seem to be concordant. Samsung pings first, Tile is sometimes as fast and sometimes a fraction slower, and Apple is a minute late. We’re talking about margins of two minutes tops, though, so all three are very reliable. But if you’re looking for something to ping you the very moment you walk away from your tag, the Galaxy SmartTag2 is a good bet.

As for Google, well, we are waiting for that feature to roll out.

Test notes: Apple 8/10, Samsung 10/10, Tile 6/10, Google 0/10

I’ve recapped my perfectly scientific, not biased at all, ratings from all the tests in the table below.

As you can see, Apple’s headstart and its Find My network’s super reliable location tracking make it the gold standard for Bluetooth trackers. It just works everywhere in every country and every setting I’ve tested it — well, short of the absolute wilderness. I still don’t understand what happened for it to fail during the fourth test, but that’s your proof that not all tech is reliable.

But what if you don’t have an iPhone to indulge in Apple’s pervasive finding network availability? Well, if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, the SmartTag2 is a no-brainer. It’s the most reliable of the Android-compatible trackers because it aggregates all Samsung phones in the world as part of its finding network, and aside from a couple of situations where it wasn’t stellar, it works really, really well. Often as fast as the AirTag and as precise, in several countries, across many crowded and uncrowded places.

Tile is fine in some countries but less so in others. You might get updates every few minutes like clockwork, or you may wait four to five hours. You really toss a coin with it, though, because you’re solely relying on other Tile users. But for those who don’t have an iPhone or a Galaxy smartphone, it still currently provides more reliability than Google’s own trackers. What I can say is that it worked everywhere for me and never failed; it was always eventually found, even in the most remote of places like Bovilla Lake in Albania. It just took time, sometimes. The unknown alerts situation, as with Samsung, is what it is. It won’t affect you if you own the tag, but it’s bad if you’re being tracked by one. That’s not something that can be fixed unless Tile cooperates with Google and Apple to integrate its trackers’ anti-stalking functions inside Android and iOS on an operating system level.

As for Google, well, what can I say that I haven’t already said? The network has significantly improved since I first started testing in mid-2024, but it’s still nowhere near as reliable as Apple’s or Samsung’s. Even Tile has a leg up at this point, and it requires a nearby Tile user, while Google’s Find My Device is supposed to be passively using millions of Android phones in the world!

When it works — and yes, some things do work very well — Find My Device is quite awesome. It has the speed and accuracy of Apple’s AirTag and Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag2. I can use it on my Pixel 9 Pro, Nothing Phone 2, Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and HONOR 200 Pro; I’m free as a bird, not tied to any brand. I love that. The problem, however, is that I don’t know when it’ll work and when it won’t. And when it doesn’t, it just does not. Five hours for Tile?! With Google, it might be days. Or the tracker could be next to me and the app is not even seeing it. Or maybe I’m trying to do the unthinkable and looking for a Bluetooth tracker over Bluetooth!

Google still has a lot to do to fix the shortcomings of its network and trackers. It also needs to add a bunch of features that already exist on the other platforms: Bluetooth-only mode, live location update while navigating to a tracker, separation alerts, UWB, and more. Until then, the promise is much, much bigger than the reality.