Unofficial Test Compares Apple AirTags to Google Find My Device — Here’s Which Tracker Wins

Google’s Find My Device service may have only been around a few months, but that’s enough time to compare it to Apple’s AirTags system.

Recently, Reddit user u/chiselplow decided to test Find My Device against AirTag. Shared by our friends at TechRadar, the test involved pairing a Pebblebee tracker with an AirTag by placing both trackers in a mailbox and sending them to another state.

Perhaps the test is unfair, since Find My Device only launched in April, while Apple’s Find My has been around since 2019. Plus, there will likely be more trackers that leverage Find My Device than AirTag for Apple devices, but it’s still good to see where things stand now.

Both trackers work by using an anonymous, crowdsourced network of nearby smartphones to find their location. However, based on chiselplow’s tests, there was a big difference in the results.

They claimed that the Apple device was constantly updating throughout the day, pinging the AirTag’s location. Meanwhile, the PebbleBee took 11 hours to show a new location. Based on their test, it appears that the PebbleBee didn’t find the location at all.

At one point, they claimed that the PebbleBee was defaulting to its previous location, the sender’s home. They also mentioned that the Find My Device map is grayscale and not super detailed, especially compared to Apple’s map, which has a satellite mode.

Their conclusion was that Google’s version of Find My Device isn’t worth it, “Pebblebee and the Google Find My Device network are garbage, and the entire service hasn’t been implemented in a way that’s usable, reliable, or worth spending money on at this point.”

The problems with the Google version may be related to several different but compact issues. First, in the US, the iPhone is the more dominant phone, while in other countries Android is more widespread. Chiselowplow seems to be American.

Additionally, Google has made the Find My Device network default to “high-traffic areas only.” To change this, users must switch to “all areas” or third-party manufacturers like Pebblebee must have this option enabled.

The tool also lacks features like UWB (ultra-wideband), although it is supposedly coming, along with Augmented Reality support. One thing that could improve it is the release of Google’s Android AirTags, although the tech giant has not announced any plans to create such a product.

For now, based solely on this one test, the feature falls short of expectations, especially when compared to Apple’s more advanced tracking network.