Apple and Google Have Ways to Find Lost Devices: Here’s the Winner

Apple’s Find My and Google’s Find My Device let you find lost items, including phones and Bluetooth trackers. Apple’s Find My can search for products like iPhoneiPad, Apple Watch and AirTags, as well as some third-party devices like Nomad’s Tracking Card. The Find My Device network can find Android devices like phones and tablets, Wear OS watches like Pixel watchsupported Bluetooth headphones and trackers, such as Chipolo’s One Point.

Google’s network is expanding and renaming the 11-year-old Android Device Manager, and Apple’s Find My network has been around since 2010. But how do these networks compare in 2024?

To find out, I took the Chipolo One Point and AirTag to Pier 39, a popular tourist spot in San Francisco. Then CNET’s John Kim hid the trackers out of Bluetooth range, and I had to locate them using the Find My app on my iPhone 14 Pro and Find My Device on my Google Pixel 8 Pro. Here’s what it looked like.

How Find My and Find My Device work

Both Apple and Google’s systems use an encrypted, crowdsourced network of other iOS or Android phones and devices to help find lost items. Each lets you:

• View the current and last known location of an item on the map
• Play a sound to find an item if it is nearby (if your device supports this feature)
• Share things like Bluetooth trackers with your friends so they can see your location too

Setting up Bluetooth trackers on any network is easy. Just hold them up to your phone and a pop-up will appear. With Chipolo’s One Point, you need to tap the tracker once to register it with Android and trigger the Fast Pair pop-up.

What is the difference between Find My and Find My Device?

Apple’s Find My network has seen modest growth since it was revamped in 2021 to support third-party item searches and in preparation for the launch of AirTag. Compare that to Google’s Find My Device, which gained similar support for third-party devices and trackers earlier this year.

Right now, Find My Device trackers only support Bluetooth, while Apple’s AirTags use both Bluetooth and ultra-wideband. This is the technology that helps pinpoint your exact location and shows distance indicators with directional assistance in the Find My app.

Apple’s AirTags also have separation alerts, called Notify When Left Behind. Select this option in the Find My app, and you’ll be notified when you leave something behind outside of Bluetooth range.

Apple’s Find My network only needs one Internet-connected iPhone or iOS device to pass by to locate a lost item. If a Find My device is not connected to the Internet and passes by a lost item, the item’s location is encrypted and passed from Find My device to Find My device until it reaches a connected device, such as an iPhone.

Google’s Find My Device settings are set to “network only in high-traffic areas” by default, meaning the network needs multiple Android devices to pass by to detect the item’s location, and only then shows a focal point based on those location reports.

However, you can go to Security > Find My Device > Find Your Devices Offline and change it to with network in all areas. This can help you find other people’s items in less trafficked areas and only requires one other Android device to locate the item, similar to Apple’s Find My Phone feature. The official Find My Phone for Android support page says, “users who enable this option help each other find items in both high- and low-traffic areas. This option can help you find lost items faster.”

For this experiment, I left all the default settings to see what would happen.

Which tracker did I find first?

When the AirTag and Chipolo tracker were “lost” somewhere in Pier 39, I loaded the apps on my iPhone and Pixel 8 Pro and marked each as lost, then started the timer. Just four minutes and forty-five seconds into the challenge, I got my first notification from Apple’s Find My. Five minutes later, I got another ping, which located the AirTag.

I waited 30 minutes to see if the Google network would find the tracker, but I didn’t get any notifications. I could, however, see the approximate location of the Chipolo tag on a map in the Find My Device app. Oddly, the network was able to triangulate the approximate location, but it never notified me that the tracker had been found.

Then I went looking for trackers using each app’s built-in location tools. Apple’s Find My gave me a map route to the AirTag, so I could see it was only a few minutes away. Google’s Find My Device was less helpful, only showing me a map view. Instructions to guide me to the approximate location of the Chipolo tag didn’t appear on the screen as an option until a few minutes later.

Once I was in Bluetooth range, the AirTag let me display precise ultra-wideband tracking options, so I could move my phone and have an arrow point me in the right direction with distance markers. The Chipolo tracker, on the other hand, has a shape that “fills in” as you get closer to an item.

I knew I was close but still couldn’t see them, so I turned on the sound on each one. The AirTag was pretty faint, but I could hear Chipolo even in the noisy environment of Pier 39.

The ultra-wideband guidance allowed me to get closer to the AirTag when I couldn’t see it, but the Chipolo’s loud audio made it much easier for me to find the tracker.

Apple’s Find My network is more reliable for now

My highly unscientific test showed that Apple’s Find My network helped me locate my lost item significantly faster than Google’s Find My Device network. I’d expect this to improve over time as the network continues to expand across Android devices, especially as more users opt to locate items in all areas. Adding ultra-wideband support to Android trackers would also level the playing field — many Android phones already have an ultra-wideband chip.

I can’t wait to take on this challenge again in a few months to see how Google’s Find My Device feature improves, especially as more devices connect to the network.

In a statement to CNET, a Google spokesperson said the company is working to improve both the speed and ability to locate lost items on its network in the coming weeks: “As devices continue to join the new Find My Device network, we expect the network to continue to grow, which will also help improve the ability to locate lost devices. We encourage Bluetooth tag owners to change their Find My Device network settings to ‘Networked in all areas’ to improve the network’s ability to locate lost items in less congested areas.”