Are Apple AirTags really better than others from Amazon?

i got 4 android tags on amazon and clearly had no idea how they were supposed to work because i put them on my dogs who immediately ran off into the 500 wooded acres behind my house never to be seen again until a neighbord from 10 miles away called and said they were laying in her yard exhausted.

so my only comment is they are glorified bluetooth devices and if there's not a critical mass of users like with iphone products you'll likely only track dogs in your front yard.

i'm guessing generic apple tags (if they exist) would leverage the same apple bluetooth network as airtags and would probably work alot better than some experimental garbage from google i dont think tracking is automatic on android devices like apple.

oh and the puppy chewed them up the next day so only hers was left; the other 3 dog tags were half in her stomach and half on the floor so there's that.

eta yes i know about gps collars but you have to charge them every day. i liked the 'passive' nature of these and the fact the battery is supposed to live for 2 years. i see why now

I think they are better just in general, but assuming you have a bunch of other apple products predominantly, there is just something to be said about how easy their products work together. I'm not saying that always justifies their huge markups, but man it really is nice how easy it is.

I have three different series of Tiles with replaceable batteries. Batteries last close to a year. I didn't even notice when they "merged" with Life360, I'm still using the same Tile app I always have been.

Bluetooth trackers don't ping often enough to be useful for dog tracking unless your dog stops moving.

At first I think Apple tags were better because iPhone usage is high in the US, and Tile trackers couldn't ping off as many phones.

Now there are Android based trackers that use many phones to locate your stuff, so the field could have changed there.

quote:

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Yes, I think they or.

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OR WHAT!!!!

I originally had gotten 4 tiles for dog, luggage, etc. Its not that the tiles are not good or the app is not good but the network is not large enough (or at least at the time wasn't) to reliably track. Although the tile had technically a larger range than the airtag, the airtag (assuming you dont live in the middle of nowhere) would reliably ping from any apple device where as tile had to ping from a device with tile installed which is wayyyyy less devices. So for my application airtags are the much better option. Also selling/transferring tiles is a nightmare because you can't simply sell them. You have to like transfer it and all kinds of stuff.

I like the wallet tile.

My issue is some of my tiles not reliably firing off the ringer so I can find them. I don't know why it just doesn't work sometimes.

I found out some guy online sells Air tag wallet trackers. He basically took them apart and form factored them.

A complication for me is I'm a split household where my wife has an Apple and I don't. So there are other considerations.

I had a Samsung tag on a car I sold and forgot about. It was put on March 2023 first week. It broadcast it's signal until July of 2024.