Since June of last year, I’ve been on a mission to find the best Bluetooth tracker for Android — the Apple AirTag killer, if you will, that works for the Android phones that we all carry everywhere. I roamed the streets of Paris, Milan, Antwerp, London, Lisbon, Tirana, Beirut, and Dubai with a bunch of trackers in my pockets; I sent them for an adventure in my husband’s backpack, left them in checked-in luggage, carried all the phones to keep an eye on them, and kept comparing them against the gold standard of Apple.
After going through Tile, Pebblebee, Chipolo, Motorola, and Samsung and trying them everywhere from busy malls to open forests, I know which one I would trust the most. So, if I were buying a tracker now to use right away, not for a potential benefit/improvement a few months down the line, there’s one choice and one choice only: Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag 2. I realize it only works with Samsung phones (unless you use the uTag app workaround on other phones), but that’s a limitation worth accepting for the excellent reliability and all the extra features Samsung has packed in its tracker. Here’s why.