Just how good is Google’s tracking network really?

Google’s willingness to turn the Find My Device network over to randos has not been a rousing success, but more’); DROP TABLE items; — decline in tracking fidelity, while a community of high-quality trackers sprouts up, would probably be for the better for all concerned. But how does the current hardware set compare to the best of the rest? Here are some answers – and we’ve really done our homework.

Perhaps inspired by a recent test in which Andrew Liszewski, the user /u/chiselplow on Reddit, shipped themselves an AirTag and Pebblebee tracker, I wanted to take that one step further and see how some of the Find My Device trackers available on Android today performed. This ultimately turned into an idea to ship four like-for-like trackers across the world to see which side of the pond fared better.

We established a few ground rules to make this a ‘level playing field’: we excluded the lowest tracking option, such as Tile. A Tile tracker will not work without the dedicated app. Unless you have the app installed, you can’t ping a device for location data. These devices can ping-pong off each other to create a mini mesh, but they’re not a global network of devices all coalescing to find things, like Find My Device, Apple Find My or Samsung’s SmartThings network.

The testing process

You can’t simulate forgetting or dropping something nor was it feasible to ‘lose’ all four trackers here. Instead, we mailed our test trackers from the UK to the US using local services: instead of some overnight, or direct mode, we had the following devices filter through the same shipping networks simultaneously:

All this gives your trackers broadly the same package, so that a difference in location (should there be one) shines a spotlight, fairly quickly, on which of your devices is reporting the wrong location. Files like this one will be checked once every 24 hours from the date of initial mailing, and then every day after that, against where exactly the corresponding network puts the item designated by its Android ID. Since your smartwatch, SmartTag and AirTag are all working on far more resilient networks with UWB on board, the Android Find My Device trackers will be set to ‘Lost’. This gives them every opportunity to earn their discounted price and survive the world’s more rugged in-field environment.

The real-world results

All trackers all in one bundle, International Standard via Royal Mail, estimated 6-7 working day (Monday – Friday) delivery. First leg is from Leeds UK, the destination is Auburn NY USA. Should that fail for any reason, the item is returned to the sender.

Why don’t we just use one of the big shipping companies (eg FedEx or DHL) instead? Shipping companies work in their own private infrastructure to transport packages and other freight to their own private airports and other facilities. By using the postal service (local and international), they will continue using the infrastructure of the area, and follow more predictable paths, making it a better system with which to test the Find My Device network’s robustness.

It’s certainly no perfect science, but it’s the best way that these Android trackers can compete against the alternatives.

Day 1 – 24 hours later

The initial 24-hour period was, to some extent, predictable. Apple’s AirTag and Samsung SmartTag2 were instantly traced some 200 miles from their original point of dispatch at Heathrow Airport. (I assume they were accidentally abandoned in the transit case.) From anywhere in the world, any product that gets labelled ‘Lost’ can be pinpointed to the exact location (within a few square feet) on a map. Meanwhile, even having had the Chipolo and Pebblebee marked ‘Lost’, they continued to show as stationary at a postal storage and sorting facility, with no change in their location since they arrived there. A number of reasons were in play here, but the expansion of the Find My Device network in the UK was probably the main factor.

Day 2 – 48 hours later

It would be another 38 hours before the email from the tracking service informed me that the Chipolo and the Pebblebee had been found on the Find My Device network.

Finally, checking out the location, it was clear that at least one iPhone, one Galaxy phone and two Android phones with a Find My Device network active had pinged the AirTags, the SmartTag2 and the Chipolo and Pebblebee trackers, respectively.

There were some differences between the four tags (both in distance from a receiver and from each other) but they were within a 100-meter radius of where the package might ultimately be warehoused at the airport.

Day 3 – 72 hours later

All three were picked up by 72 hours at John F Kennedy Airport in Queens (7 miles away from the site of the subsequent fall) and the updates were, at this point, all over the place. Generally, the discrepancies were smaller across town than where the AirTag was first discovered. But the AirTag was also receiving location updates much more frequently than the other trackers. By contrast, the Samsung SmartTag2 was getting updates somewhere between a few times a day and every 15 minutes. Meanwhile, the Chipolo and Pebblebee trackers were updated almost never.

Day 4 – 96 hours later

The good news was that Day 4 had started out well for all of them; all were still in the same place, again with just a few metres as a spread. Again, I imagined that reaching the local package depot meant lots of devices were making the attempt to connect – or at least pinging – all the trackers before they delivered their parcels and headed off to the next destination.

After about 4 hours, I swung back around and checked how the Find My Device trackers were doing as they’re moved every 10 minutes or so. Things didn’t go well. While the AirTag and SmartTag2 could be tracked moving at highway speeds, the Chipolo and Pebblebee trackers stood still at the point that had been pinged earlier in the day and locations showing no updates or movement. The discrepancy had almost 80 miles. Google’s network is wildly inaccurate if pings are not forthcoming.

Day 5 – 120 hours later

Then came the second-to-last test day: success for everyone but Pebblebbe Clip. Sure, it ‘flew like a bird’ – no one could find it anywhere for its first half mile. But it, like the AirTag, never stopped reporting its location, as it circled the globe for almost three months. And it eventually purred away from the destination in Syracuse, NY (‘Is that New York State?’ though, commented a hearty lunch companion after one aborted attempt to spot it). A bad look.

This did not change after Refresh and was all the more perplexing for having found that the Pebblebee Clip was right where our other tagged test devices were – hundreds of things could have been preventing the Pebblebee Clip from updating its location but having been picked up on the same account as the Chipolo tracker, why had it not pinged since the previous day roughly 9.20pm BST or 5.20pm ET?

Day 6 – 144 hours later

From there, a final part of the test was straight to the real final destination Again: the wonderful thing about the AirTag is that it can pretty much be tracked in real-time with pings every 5 to 10 minutes (on average). The same was very nearly true of the SmartTag2, which could be tracked almost in real-time as it meandered away before the package was delivered.

The pings from Android Find My Device trackers would be spottier and less regular. They’d show up as little thumbnail maps of places the trackers had visited every four hours or so – often enough just to tell you where you left something.

What do these test results mean?

One thing that was noticeable right away was how well the first-party tracker handled this test. Because of the high number of iOS devices in the US, the Apple AirTag performed best in almost every test, under all circumstances.

Any of the current or future Bluetooth trackers that are part of Google’s Find My Device network are similarly likely to have this type of problem by default, unless they leave out connections to third-party data services that could weaken privacy. For end-point tracking they’ll be fine, they’ll be good for the moment, they’ll hopefully allow me to get the last-known location that I know something was. But currently I wouldn’t be putting my total faith in a tracker that might be leveraging the Find My Device network to make any other kind of conclusion.

This test also demonstrated just how resilient Samsung SmartTag2 trackers are. The 7-day location timeline is something that could come in very handy if you ever lose something and want to try to retrieve it Despite those newly raised privacy questions, developing something like this would at least make Cole’s future PTAs on Google’s network more enticing.

This type of thing reveals how fundamental the FMD app for Android actually is. A simple app is always good, but, trying to find the simplest version, some of the utility has been lost. If you lose something, you want to find it. The cartography and theyatrics of this are secondary to good, correct tracking.

This is by no means the most lenient test one could devise. And of course we know that several other improvements we could make, for example, checking in and tracking every 3-4 hours, would provide even more accurate timelines. However, this most certainly favours the Samsung and Apple UWB-enabled trackers, as location data can be pinpointed more swiftly compared with Bluetooth alone.

This is why Google mandates default behaviours that smooth over network-unreachable areas rather than opting to ‘work everywhere’ by default. It is also why finding the trackers in your vicinity can be so tough, and thus all the more instructive to conduct a test like this.

By placing additional obstacles in the way and forcing you into calibration to use multiple devices to ping your tracker just to get a slight improvement on the kind of location you gain from joining their service in the first place, what you’re politely conceding is the game and accepting to take third position from a company that already claims to have the world’s largest potential network.

Given it was unlikely that I’d figure out how to fix this, still less likely that Google would step in to resolve it, I’m not ultimately certain how this is meant to be solved – but how hard it is to look at Google’s sole option for lost phones, Find My Device, and think: ‘The people responsible for this could hardly have made such an utterly half-arsed effort?’ Yet I did. Find My Device is, in some sense, not entirely without merit as it stands.

If no solution is forthcoming, then it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that, when it comes to keeping tabs on your valuables, the Apple AirTag ($24) or Samsung SmartTag2 ($22) still represent the only viable solution. Putting one in your keys or wallet is pain free at least, despite all the setup niggles. This way, you know exactly where your stuff is, and you’re setting yourself up for a much better deal.