Google's Find My Device was only announced a few months ago, but that's enough time to compare it to Apple's AirTags.

Recently, Reddit user u/chiselplow decided to put Find My Device and AirTags to the test in person, and in this test shared by our friends at TechRadar, they compared the Pebblebee tracker and AirTag to both trackers in a mailbox and compared them by posting them in different states.

This test may be unfair because Find My Device was just launched in April and Apple's Find My has been around since 2019. Also, there will probably be more tracking devices using Find My Device versus AirTag for Apple devices. Still, it is good to see how things are currently going.

Both trackers work by using an anonymous crowdsourced network of nearby smartphones to find their location. However, according to chiselplow's tests, the results were very different.

They claimed that Apple devices continuously updated AirTag location information throughout the day. The PebbleBee, on the other hand, took 11 hours to display a new location. According to their tests, the PebbleBee did not actually find the location at all.

At some point, they claimed that PebbleBee now shows the previous location, the sender's home, by default. They also noted that the Find My Device map was grayscale and not super detailed, especially compared to Apple's map, which features satellite mode.

Their conclusion was that "Pebblebee and Google Find My Device Network are hot garbage, and the whole thing is not deployed in a way that is useful, reliable, and worth spending money on at this point.

Google's version of the problem may be related to several different but compact issues. One is that the iPhone is the dominant device in the U.S., while Android is more prevalent in other countries; Chiselowplow seems to be American; the iPhone is the most popular device in the U.S., while Android is the most popular device in other countries.

Also, Google has set the default setting for the Find My Device network to "high traffic areas only." To change this, users would need to switch to "all areas" or have a third-party manufacturer like Pebblebee turn it on.

The tool also lacks features like UWB (ultra-wideband), which is supposed to come along with augmented reality (AR) support. A possible improvement would be the release of Google-made Android AirTags, but the giant tech company has not announced plans to create such a product.

So far, based solely on this one test, the feature is not quite up to snuff, especially when compared to Apple's more robust tracking network.