Head to Head AirTag and Tile Location Comparison

mckinney3 · January 20, 2022 5:34PM

I placed an AirTag and A Tile in a padded mailer and placed in the rural route mailbox for pick-up. I wanted to follow the tags and see what the reporting comparison was.

Two things became very apparent-

1.) The location stated for both the AirTAg and the Tlle are the location of the phone that was pinged by the Tag. I found that the reporting distance could be much further than 30 feet. (My assumption is the route carrier was not carrying a phone device as there was no Ping at the drop box.) Often as the delivery vehicle would go up a street, the Tags would be pinged by phones well within a house. Do not confuse the location reported as to the actual location of the Tag. The Tag location will always be offset by the distance between the Tag and the device that pings it. The location should be thought of in a macro sense and not a micro.

2.) My main ahah, though, was the shear volume of data (pings) obtained from the AirTag and the scarcity of data from the Tile.

The crowd sourcing by every iPhone in existence that is in the right place just overwhelms the devices that are in the right place AND running the Tile app.
For this particular experiment in a combined rural and metropolitan area, the ping ratio was 15 to 1 in favor of the AirTag. At T+8 hours the location shows as sitting in a USPS Distribution Center 50 miles away as pinged by the AirTAg and the Tile is reporting being stuck in the gathering center 50 miles in the other direction.
The data from the Tile is not granular enough to learn much about its whereabouts and journey. Yes, the Tile has in its favor that a Trip log is available in the Premium plan but , IMHO, is not worth much if the log is missing a ton of data.
In fairness to Tile, there is no logging of pings for the AirTag so if you are not manually recording pings as they are updated then the AirTag user has no log either.
I am finding, though, that sooner or later a Tile will get pinged and its location reported. If the envelope is stationary long enough, then the Tile and AirTag will “catch up” with each other and report same location. In this experiment after 24 hours the envelope containing both devices reports at the same location. The journey to get there for the Tile is lost but not for the AirTag f the user logs the AirTag pings as they arrive.
The crowd sourcing by every iPhone in existence that is in the right place just overwhelms the devices that are in the right place AND running the Tile app.
For this particular experiment in a combined rural and metropolitan area, the ping ratio was 15 to 1 in favor of the AirTag. At T+8 hours the location shows as sitting in a USPS Distribution Center 50 miles away as pinged by the AirTAg and the Tile is reporting being stuck in the gathering center 50 miles in the other direction.
The data from the Tile is not granular enough to learn much about its whereabouts and journey. Yes, the Tile has in its favor that a Trip log is available in the Premium plan but , IMHO, is not worth much if the log is missing a ton of data.
In fairness to Tile, there is no logging of pings for the AirTag so if you are not manually recording pings as they are updated then the AirTag user has no log.
I am finding, though, that sooner or later a Tile will get pinged and its location reported. If the envelope is stationary long enough, then the Tile and AirTag will “catch up” with each other and report same location. In this experiment after 24 hours the envelope containing both devices reports at the same location. The journey to get there for the Tile is lost but not for the AirTag if the user logs the AirTag pings as they arrive.

I will edit this post by adding what happens next after watching the Tags leave the Distribution Center and are in pure metropolitan environment. I will also report on the effectiveness of Apple's anti-stalking algorithm as the AirTag will follow the recipient who is aware of its arrival at the destination address for a few days before being mailed back.