[ehsankia]

> 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.

[port11]

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.

[notatoad]

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.

[ornornor]

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.

[kiwijamo]

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.

[darknavi]

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

[ehsankia]

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.

[igama]

Yes