Apple AirTags Retested After 5 Years: How They Compare to Bluetooth Tracker Rivals

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ZDNET’s key points

• Apple AirTags are still the most reliable and accurate tracking option.
• Third-party tags work well for both iOS and Android.
• Any tracking tag dramatically increases the chances of recovering lost items.

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Of all the gear I’ve tried over the last few years, none have changed my life for the better Apple AirTags. My grandfather had a saying: “a place for everything, and everything in its place” – but as much as I try to be a tidy person like him, I can never remember where I left my keys or which bag or coat my wallet is in.

I guess nobody is perfect.

Also: I bought a wax camera for my tool kit and used it for everything but the ears

AirTags changed all that. It wasn’t long before I was attaching tags to my keys, wallet, and bags that, honestly, my life improved, reducing home frustrations and travel anxieties in one fell swoop. Since then, the market for third-party search tags has grown.

The AirTag was ambitious: a tiny, battery-powered tag that leveraged an ecosystem of more than a billion devices to anonymously detect and report its position anywhere in the world where a iPhone, iPador iPod Touch (remember that?). But instead of relying solely on Bluetooth, it also made use of another technology called Ultra-Wideband.

Before AirTags I had been using tile tags While Tile were pretty decent Bluetooth tags, the network of people running the Tile app was pretty small, so the chances of finding them if you lost something outside your home were slim (Tile’s tag network has improved since then, but they’re still not part of either Apple’s or Google’s tag network).

Also: I carried this Bluetooth tracking card in my backpack for a week, and it held up to my clumsiness

While Bluetooth has limitations in terms of range, location accuracy, energy efficiency, and security, UWB brings improved range, centimeter accuracy, a high level of energy efficiency (because it can switch between UWB and Bluetooth Low Energy), and a much higher level of security to prevent spoofing and nefarious tracking. And since Apple had the foresight to add UWB support to its devices years before releasing AirTags, the ecosystem for UWB support was already in place.

How it all started

When AirTags were released, I bought a pack of four and then scattered across Scotland to see their iPhones taken from passing cars and the pockets of pedestrians.

I was surprised at how good the detection was. I managed to recover all but one of my tags – not due to tag failure, but because it had fallen victim to road mowing and he was later last spotted at a landfill four hours away.

Also: This AirTag alternative with a 130dB siren and strobe light has my name written all over it

Five years later, AirTags has had an update. The second-generation AirTags include improved Bluetooth, a better and louder speaker, and a U2 chip that allows for an extended precision search range and support for Apple Watch. Now we also have Google’s Find Hub, Android’s answer to Apple’s Find My network for iOS.

With the new AirTags on the scene, along with a booming third-party tag ecosystem, what better time to try to replicate my experiment?

how are you now

I had to go on a road trip, so I grabbed a handful of tags with the idea of ​​scattering them around somewhere to see how they worked. I was interested in trying a few things. First, I wanted to see if there was any difference between Apple’s Find My and Google’s Find Hub networks in terms of performance, accuracy, and overall reliability.

I also wanted to see how “lost mode” (the feature that notifies you every time someone else’s device picks up a lost tag) works. I also wanted to see if the AirTag was still the market leader or if there is something better out there. Also, since the weather took a bit of a turn for the worse, I might test how weatherproof these modern tags are.

Along with a second-generation AirTag, I took one with me Chipolo carda KeySmart smart cardalready LuLuLook AirCard Pro.

Also: This Bluetooth tracker has effectively replaced my AirTag with its improved durability alone

Apart from the AirTag, they are all credit card style trackers, and I deliberately chose them for the simple reason that they would be easier to find than small tags if the tracking failed: I didn’t want to contribute to littering an area. In my testing and personal experience, there is no performance difference between a key tag and a card style tag, so this would not stack the deck in any way.

I grabbed these trackers, took them out of the box in my two-star motel room (fantastic!), creating a mountain of cardboard junk in the process, gave them a quick charge using a portable wireless chargerI plugged them into my iPhone or Android smartphone and then scattered them around my motel parking lot.

To make the test more difficult, I left my iPhone and Android phone in the hotel room while I went on my mission to leave tags. I left them in places where someone could drop or leave their wallet or keys, but it wasn’t so obvious that someone would pick them up to steal them or throw them in the trash.

After spending some time in the bushes, I went back to my room and waited a few hours before putting my tags in lost mode. As much as I want to bore you with all the details of this experiment, I’ll stick with the highlights.

Also: This quirky little device solved my biggest problem with my Apple Watch

The best tag in terms of detection range, search accuracy, and how often others detected it while in lost mode was the AirTag. If I had to choose one tag, it would be the AirTag. This is the only tag I was able to collect from inside the motel, which is quite a feat considering I was a story and the tag was behind several walls.

When it comes to third-party tags on the Apple Find My network, I found that they all worked almost equally well. None have precision search, but when it comes to being picked up by passing cars and pedestrians, they seem to work well with Apple devices.

But what about all you Android users out there?

The main difference I noticed with tags for Android devices is that I got fewer pings from them in lost mode, even though I always had an iOS tag and an Android tag close to each other. I’m not sure if there are just more iPhones around, or if iPhones in general have a better (or perhaps more consistent) search engine tag detection range.

That said, all the tags I tested for Android pinged me their location several times a day, more than enough to let me find them if I’d dropped my keys or wallet.

As for finding all the non-AirTag tags, the tags sounded loud enough to find them over the noise of traffic on the road and even if buried in undergrowth. This meant I didn’t have to creep suspiciously through the bushes for too long to retrieve all my tags.

the result

The TL;DR in all of this is that any tag is better than no tag, and if you can’t use an AirTag tag, using a third-party tag increases your chances of recovering your lost items dramatically. All of these tags would have given me the location of my lost items within an hour of putting them into lost mode and would have kept pinging me their location throughout the day.