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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

> relatively affordable

You can buy 4 third-party trackers for the price of 1 official one.

They do lack UWB, though there are other great form factors such as cards, and cool features such as wireless charging or usb-c charging, which imo is nicer than swapping batteries every few months.

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I have a third-party tracker and the AirTag in my bicycle. The third-party tracker has no clue what it’s doing or meant to do. But then again, the AirTag is completely inaudible in a decently-sized bicycle parking garage.

i thought so too, but in practice i've been getting much better battery life from the official airtag on my keychain, than i do from the "atuvos" trackers that see much less use. high-precision UWB finding and half as many coin cells used makes the airtag an easy choice over the cheaper trackers for me.

the card-shaped one i've got in my wallet isn't going to be replaced by an official airtag any time soon though, that form factor is too nice.

There is a lot of variance amongst third party/clone tags. I had some grey plastic losanges for a while they were junk and all ended up in the trash. Now I have a bunch of Hoco tags and they’re decent (especially for the price)

Would love to know what card tag you’d recommend, I’m after one.

i've got the"ATUVOS Air Tracker Tag Card Wallet Tracker", purchased november 2023 and it's still going strong.

but i think there's some available now in the card form factor that have rechargeable batteries, and that's what i'll buy when i have to replace this one.

The reliability of the other brands are quite poor though. I've tried Tile, I've tried Pebble (using Google's network) and neither has worked reliability enough. So I ended up switching to AirTags and so far I have been impressed with the reliability - it works 100% of the time which is not something I could say about Tile nor Pebble/Google.

Do they plug into the Find My network that iOS devices use?

Yep, Tile I believe is the only third party service that exists. All other trackers either plug into "Apple Find My" or "Android Find My Device" network. There's finally starting to be a few devices that can do both, but they're rare, so make sure you get the right one when buying. But they take 10s to setup and it's very smooth.

Samsung trackers also use their own network.

Tiles are about the same price as AirTags (at least they were last time I bought some)

Any names or recs on the ones that can do both? Can they do both simultaneously?

I haven't used it, but the verge recommended the pebblebee clip5: https://pebblebee.com/products/clip-5

(or the card 5 for wallets)

Yes

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