Android’s Bluetooth trackers are finally shipping in late May

After an announcement that ended up being a year early, Android’s version of Tile/AirTags is ready to launch. Google has been gearing up on the software side of things to enable a Bluetooth tracking network on Android, and the company’s two tracking tag hardware partners, Pebblebee and Chipolo, now have ship dates. The two companies each have a press release today, with Pebblebee saying its trackers will ship in “late May” while Chipolo says it will ship “after May 27th.” Google has a blog post out, too, promising “additional Bluetooth tags from Eufy, Jio, Motorola and more” later this year.

Both sets of devices have been up for preorder for a year now, and it doesn’t seem like anything has changed since. Both companies are offering little Bluetooth trackers in a keychain tag or credit card format, and Pebblebee has a third stick-on tag format. They’ll all be anonymously tracked by Android’s 3 billion device Bluetooth tracker network, and the device owner will be able to see them in Google’s “Find my device” app.

Chipolo’s “One Point” key chain tag is the only thing that takes a CR2032 coin cell battery, while the credit card tracker is not rechargeable. Pebblebee’s key chain, credit card, and stick-on tracker all have rechargeable batteries, including the wallet card, which is very rare. Nothing has UWB for precise location tracking—everything uses a speaker. Both companies sell multiple SKUs of what look like the exact same product, but are locked to Google’s or Apple’s network—no switching allowed.

These were all supposed to come out in 2023 originally. Google’s patch notes say that the tracking network shipped in Android in December 2022, even though nothing is using it. The company has actually been waiting on Apple. In May 2023, Google and Apple announced a joint standard for “unknown tracker” alerts. While the two networks will not be compatible, they will team up to alert users if a tracker is being used to stalk them. All this hardware was announced a week later, but in July 2023, Google shipped its half of the joint tracking standard (enabling Android phones to alert users to an unknown AirTag), and the company said it wouldn’t enable its tracking network until Apple released its half of the standard in iOS. It looks like Apple will do that in iOS 17.5, taking a year to do what Google did in a month. iOS 17.5 is expected to be out—you guessed it—at the end of May, so these tags can finally ship.

Listing image by Chipolo