I shipped Apple, Google, and Tile Bluetooth trackers across Europe. The results surprised me

After Google launched its Find Hub network in the summer of 2024, I spent more than a year testing it as well as all the compatible Bluetooth trackers and came away more than disappointed. Find Hub was very unreliable, and my trackers would sometimes only update their location once every few hours and disconnect pretty often, even when they were right next to my phone. This happened in several cities and countries across Europe and West Asia.

But things have drastically improved since then. Nowadays, every time I check the Find Hub app, all my trackers show an updated location — often within the previous minute or two. A Pebblebee Find Hub-compatible tracker even saved my luggage in Athens, thanks to its very accurate and up-to-date location. But was this just a vague impression, or have they really become more reliable? I decided to test it out by shipping a bunch of trackers to my Android Authority colleagues to find out.

Since I’ve been testing a lot of Bluetooth trackers for Android Authority, they’ve been piling up on my desk, so I thought it was high time I shared the goods with the rest of the team. After all, there’s only so many backpacks, bags, and slings I can slide these in.

I packed up a bunch of trackers to ship from Paris to my Managing Editor in Romania: Bogdan was headed for MWC in Barcelona and could easily share the trackers with several team members there. I reset a few trackers and removed their batteries, but I kept four of them alive:

• Pebblebee Clip – Google Find Hub
• Pebblebee Tag – Google Find Hub
• Tile Mate Pro – Tile app
• Chipolo ONE Spot – Apple Find My

The Tile and Chipolo had functional batteries inserted, while the Pebblebee trackers were charged up. All four were still connected to my accounts, so I could keep an eye on them on their journey. Since my goal was to see how well Google’s network was working, I checked up on the other trackers a little less often. Also, I don’t carry my test iPhone with me all the time, so I couldn’t track the Chipolo as frequently as the Pebblebee trackers.

Google’s trackers were astonishingly accurate and fast

Every single time I opened Find Hub to check where my Pebblebee Clip and Tag were, I saw that the location had last been updated within one to four minutes. The longest delay was around seven minutes. It was surprising to see this consistently good timing throughout the trackers’ journey from Paris to Romania, then to Barcelona.

The trackers went from the post office in La Défense, where I deposited the package, to the area around Roissy and Charles de Gaulle airport. They stayed there for several days, moving around the airport’s facilities until they were shipped to Romania. This was actually the only time I lost track of them for a couple of hours, since they were flying. Then they landed in Romania near the airport and made their way to Bogdan. A day later, they disappeared for a few more hours as they flew with Bogdan to Barcelona and landed near Avenida Diagonal.

What surprised me most about this entire experiment is that I never really lost track of them (apart from the flight durations), whether they were roaming the empty, infrastructure-heavy Roissy area, rural Romania, or Barcelona’s city center. This is proof of how good and reliable Google’s network has become.

Last year, I was recommending people buy Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag 2 as the only reliable Android tracker, even if they had to use the hacky uTag app to make it work on non-Samsung phones, but this isn’t the case anymore. Yes, Samsung’s tracker still has some benefits for Samsung smartphone users (location history, smart home controls, plenty of extra features), but the core feature, i.e., tracking a lost item, is no longer so vastly inferior on Google’s Find Hub trackers. So if you don’t have a Samsung phone, I can finally confidently say that you don’t need the hacks anymore. You should be good with any new Pebblebee, Chipolo, or modern Find Hub tracker, which will pair with the default Find Hub app on any Android phone.

On several occasions during the experiment, I checked to see what the Chipolo ONE Spot and Tile Mate Pro were reporting back in comparison to the Pebblebee trackers. The four trackers were on par a few times, but there were still instances where both Tile and Apple’s networks were slower to update than Google’s.

I saw lapses that went anywhere from seven minutes to 41 minutes on Apple’s Find My, while Tile could go many hours behind. These are all tabulated when the trackers were on the ground, not flying, and while the Pebblebee Tag and Clip were showing a more recent and more accurate location on Google’s Find Hub. See for yourself — these sets of screenshots were all taken at the same time:

I expected this kind of discrepancy from Tile, especially once the package was out in the weeds in rural Romania. After all, the network isn’t as widespread as Apple’s or Google’s in Europe. But still, seeing several hours of delay around Roissy was very disappointing on my Tile Mate Pro. Even when it had reached Barcelona, it was still slow to report its location — often exhibiting delays of 15-20 minutes.

What I didn’t expect, though, was seeing some big delays from Apple’s network. Most times, it hovered between four and seven minutes, but I frequently saw it 15 minutes behind or more, which is uncharacteristic of Apple’s network. Maybe it happened because I was using a third-party Chipolo tracker (though that shouldn’t be a factor), or maybe because the battery was weak and the tracker wasn’t updating its location as frequently in order to conserve power. But nothing explains the 41-minute lag below when the tracker was in the middle of the busy Otopeni airport, while Pebblebee and Tile were only showing a couple of minutes of delay.

Whatever the reason, I’m very disappointed in Apple’s performance there. The company’s Find My used to be the gold standard against which I measured all trackers, but after seeing Google’s network performance in this test, I’m starting to question: Should I start measuring tracker performance against Google Find Hub instead? After all, it’s the one that updated consistently throughout the entire journey and never lost my package. Maybe Android’s widespread presence is finally playing the positive role we were hoping for in making Find Hub a solid, reliable tracking network.

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