Whoever lost their keys recently will instinctively understand the interest of AirTag, the small Bluetooth tracker released by Apple on April 30 for iPhones exclusively. Attached to a keychain or housed in a bag, it signals its position when lost. We organized a huge game of hide and seek to verify this promise.
A colleague thus hid a few AirTags in the four corners of an apartment, then in a large open space office. Most of the time, we found them in a minute. The iPhone spotted their position even hidden under a pillow, even crouched at the bottom of a drawer, sometimes through two closed doors. But past ten to twenty meters, AirTags generally become undetectable.
If an object is lost further away, whether it is 50 meters or 50 kilometers, all is not lost: it is often enough to be patient. Apple’s tracker, however, is not a replica of a police snitch, it does not include a GPS antenna or telephone subscription transmitting its position in real time. It only includes a wireless antenna that regularly sends small Bluetooth messages to the surroundings, accompanied by its identification code.
The iPhones of passers-by do most of the work: they detect messages from the lost AirTag and transmit its approximate position to the owner of the tracker, even if it is located miles away, anonymously and silently. .
A formidable snitch
All Apple smartphones – millions in France – are programmed to “listen” to AirTags (according to Apple, it is possible to deactivate this function, but we have not been able to verify it). To test the effectiveness of this vast detection net, we hid a few AirTags in a busy Parisian park, in a crowded bakery, then in a very quiet street in 19e borough. All were discovered by the iPhone community within half an hour: they appeared on the map of Apple’s Find My app.
By going there, we were able to get our hands on it quite easily, with one exception. In the thick undergrowth of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the iPhone indicated that the Airtag was less than a step away while it was actually emerging ten meters from us: we took half an hour to reset hand over it. The dense vegetation probably made the Bluetooth signal ricochet in all directions, making it indecipherable.
According to our information, the tracker is not intended to follow the position of a living being, unlike the competing brands Tile and Samsung.
In French cities, where iPhones are plentiful, the AirTag is a formidable snitch. Apple, however, designed its tracker to prevent it from being used to track people without their knowledge, by slipping it into a spouse’s bag, for example.
The AirTag changes its behavior when it is moved away from its owner’s iPhone. If it stays still for more than three days, it starts ringing. If, on the contrary, it moves at the same time as another person’s iPhone, it sends an alert message to the latter. Apple does not, however, specify after how long. Maybe that’s not a bad thing: the less clear the rules, the harder they are to get around by bad guys.
The AirTag seems to be intended for objects, but we regret that its product page on the Apple site does not explicitly mention it. According to our information, the tracker is not intended to follow the position of a living being, unlike the competing brands Tile and Samsung, which show in their advertisements owners attaching the snitch to the necklaces of cats and of dogs.
Silent guidance
What is Apple’s AirTag worth against the historical specialist Tile? Tile’s tracker, launched in 2015, also works on iPhone, but in our testing it is largely dominated by Apple’s AirTag. The community of users of the first is well alerted when a tracker is lost, but it is much smaller than that of the second. In three days, we have not succeeded in obtaining the position of the Tiles voluntarily lost in Paris. We only managed to recover them thanks to the AirTags hidden next to them.
When you approach about twenty meters from the Tile, the iPhone detects it well, but it does not offer silent guidance, unlike Apple’s tracker. The iPhone indicates the distance of the AirTag, on average around ten meters, then displays an arrow a few meters later on its screen, pointing to where the AirTag is located.
This silent guidance only works with recent smartphones (iPhone 11 and above). But thanks to him, we are not forced to ring the bell of the tracker of Apple. Difficult to locate by ear in a busy street, it would in any case risk disturbing a colleague or waking up a loved one in a calm environment. Conversely, for the moment, the Tiles can only be spotted via their ringtone, but the brand has told us to work on a silent positioning. The only asset of the Tile at this time is its button: a double-click makes the smartphone ring if it is within Bluetooth range, to locate it in the house. A very useful function which the AirTag lacks.
We also pitted Apple’s tracker against Samsung’s SmartTag, even though that tracker isn’t a direct competitor – it’s only for Samsung smartphones and tablets. When a SmartTag was lost in Paris, miles from its owner, we received an alert after an hour on average, allowing us to locate it on the map, a rather satisfactory delay – three times slower than with Apple’s AirTag however. Indoors and at close range, on the other hand, the range of the Samsung tracker was found to be better than that of the AirTag, and its ringtone more powerful. It is therefore more easily spotted in large homes.
You can locate the Samsung SmartTag silently thanks to a small gauge that indicates the strength of the Bluetooth signal. But arrived at around three meters, it is often necessary to ring it to complete the spotting. The SmartTag is significantly larger, less stylish, and less easy to use than Apple’s AirTag.
A valuable aid but an excessive price
Very effective, the tracker of Apple is a precious aid for the heads in the air. As is often the case with Apple, its price is excessive: 35 euros per unit, or 5 to 10 euros more than competing trackers. Sum to which it will often be necessary to add a strap sold for 10 to 40 euros, because the AirTag does not include the hook with which its competitors are equipped.
But is there really competition? With Tile’s tracker, when keys are lost in the street, they cannot be found for long days, for lack of a French community large enough to signal its position. Since Tile’s products work with any Apple or Android smartphone, we have to hope that this community will grow thanks to Android smartphone owners. In the meantime, AirTag is a better choice.
Note in passing that the competing product of Samsung, the SmartTag intended exclusively for smartphones from the Korean manufacturer, if it is a little less convincing than the AirTag, works much better than the Tile. When will there be a common standard between manufacturers, so that the mobiles of all the heads in the air in the world join hands?