Shocking: I ranked five key trackers & only ONE stood out!

Three of these five run on a CR2032 coin cell and one of them is sealed shut. That sounds like a small thing until you notice what it actually means: a tracker with a dead battery does not tell you it is dead in any way you will notice. It just stops, and you carry on trusting it. The coin cell trackers here are rated for a year or more, which is fine, but a year passes and then you are standing in a supermarket aisle trying to remember which size cell you need. Tile removed the problem by removing the option, and after roughly three years the whole tracker goes in a drawer. Spotminders and Pebblebee are the two that took the other route: a cable, an hour and a half, and it is full again.

Every tracker on this list plays a sound. Only two of them do anything about light, and this is the gap nobody talks about in the listings. Sound gets you to the right room. It does not get you to the gap between the seat and the centre console, and it does not help at all once you are on your knees at eleven at night. Apple's own support forums are full of people who located an AirTag perfectly and then could not physically reach it, including the very specific indignity of the phone telling you there is not enough light to finish the search. Spotminders is the only one here that fires the tone and the light together, on the same press. Pebblebee has the light. Everyone else has a noise and a good luck.

Find My is already running on more than a billion Apple devices and nobody had to opt in. That is the whole reason it works, and it is the single biggest thing separating the top of this list from the bottom. Tile is the clearest illustration of the alternative. Its network is estimated at around 70 million devices, so a lost set of keys is only found when another Tile user happens to walk past with the app alive on their phone. In a city centre that sometimes happens. On a residential street it mostly does not. A tracker is only ever as good as the number of phones quietly listening for it.

This one is almost funny. The best tracker in the test, by network and by precision finding, cannot be attached to a keyring without buying something else. The AirTag has no hole in it. Holders run from about $8 for a basic third party clip up to $29 or $39 for Apple's own leather, and the loop is the part that eventually fails. Spotminders moulded the keyring hole into the aluminium frame and put the ring in the box. It is a small design decision that quietly removes an entire category of failure, which is the kind of thing you only appreciate after the second holder has worn through.