Bluetooth trackers are useful, but for situations where you need precise location tracking—like if you lose your keys inside your home and don’t want to play hide and seek with the tracker’s alert sounds—Ultra Wideband (UWB) comes to the rescue.
It’s a technology found in AirTags and some other trackers that greatly improves tracking precision, but there’s a catch. If you’re on Android, chances are your phone doesn’t support UWB in the first place, and even if it does, you’re limited to just a few UWB trackers. As things stand now, that likely won’t improve anytime soon, which is a shame.
What’s UWB?
Ultra-precise tracking
Ultra Wideband (UWB) isn’t a new technology, but it came into focus for the general tech audience when Apple released the iPhone 11. A few years later, the company launched the first generation of AirTags with UWB support on select devices.
Unlike Bluetooth, UWB offers very precise location tracking, also known as Precision Finding. The caveat is that the tech only works over short distances, but thanks to more than 1.5 billion devices that are part of Apple’s Find My network, an AirTag can use Bluetooth to broadcast its location to nearby Apple devices and then, once you’re nearby, use UWB to help you locate it with precision measured in inches.
Aside from excellent precision, UWB can also determine the angle from which the incoming signal is arriving, allowing tracking apps to use an arrow to point you toward the tracker and the item it’s attached to.
Combining Bluetooth and UWB with nearby devices that are part of networks like Apple’s Find My and Google’s Find Hub could create the ultimate tracker, which the AirTag more or less already is. But even without the wider tracking network, having a UWB tracker is great when you need to find your wallet or keys that are lost somewhere in your home. Unfortunately, UWB support on Android is still very poor.
8/10
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Motorola
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Plastic
The Moto Tag is a UWB-equipped Bluetooth tracker capable of managing your valuables, finding your phone, and even acting as a photo remote.
UWB support on Android is lackluster
And it’ll likely stay that way
There are multiple reasons why UWB isn’t really a thing on Android. Unlike Apple, which controls both hardware and software, the Android ecosystem is much more fragmented. Phone manufacturers decide whether they’ll equip their phones with UWB, Google decides whether it’ll support it on Find Hub, and tracker manufacturers also have to equip their devices with UWB.
The first stumbling block is the limited number of Android phones that pack UWB. While Google has equipped its Pixel phones with UWB starting with the Pixel 6 Pro, it only includes UWB on Pro and Pro XL models, leaving regular Pixel and Pixel a phones out. Worse still, even though they support UWB, Google has no plans to enable Precision Finding on the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro, with the feature only supported on the Pixel 8 Pro and newer devices.
Samsung is doing something similar, with UWB only found on Galaxy S Plus and Ultra models, with even the $900 base Galaxy S26 left out to dry. Other Android brands are even worse. Not counting Pixel Pros and Galaxy S phones, only a handful of Android phones support UWB, and this likely won’t change anytime soon.
Then you’ve got the dirt-poor Android UWB tracker market. The only UWB Android trackers that work across devices with UWB Precision Finding support are the Moto Tag and the Moto Tag 2. While you can make Galaxy SmartTag trackers, which support UWB Precision Finding, work on non-Samsung devices with an app such as uTag, they officially only work with Samsung Galaxy phones, and their UWB features are limited to Galaxy phones with UWB support.
To add insult to injury, SmartTags don’t work with Google’s Find Hub and are limited to Samsung’s SmartThings network. In other words, if you don’t own a UWB-equipped Samsung phone, you’re effectively limited to just two UWB tracker options on Android: the Moto Tag and the Moto Tag 2. As for Find Hub UWB support, Google’s app does support it, but it only added support in mid-2025, meaning you couldn’t properly use UWB on Android even if you had the right phone and a Moto Tag until fairly recently.
The poor UWB implementation on Android likely won’t improve because there’s a slim chance more Android brands will start equipping their phones with UWB, and Samsung and Google are unlikely to bring it to their more affordable handsets.
To make matters worse, Apple doesn’t allow third-party trackers access to UWB Precision Finding on iPhones, meaning third-party tracker manufacturers have little incentive to add UWB to their products. What’s the point of including UWB when the market would consist of only a few Android phones?
The end result is that most Android users are stuck with Bluetooth trackers, and if you want to use UWB on Android, your only choice are Moto Tag trackers, or a SmartTag if you own a high-end Samsung phone.
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Plastic
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IP67
The Samsung Galaxy SmartTag 2 is the tracker to get if you own a Samsung Galaxy phone with UWB support.
Bluetooth 6.0 could solve the issue of precise tracking on Android
But only on new phones
A silver lining here is a Bluetooth 6.0 feature called Channel Sounding. Like UWB, Channel Sounding allows Bluetooth devices to support precise tracking that includes both distance and direction. Its accuracy is said to be comparable to UWB, with accuracy levels of +/- 20 cm. Better still, Android has supported Channel Sounding since Android 15.
There are a few caveats, of course. There are only a handful of Bluetooth 6.0 trackers, such as the Chipolo POP and LOOP, but they still don’t fully implement Channel Sounding as of this writing. Next, you need a phone with Bluetooth 6.0 to use Channel Sounding, limiting you to recently released high-end Android phones, with some expensive models, such as the base Galaxy S26, still stuck on older Bluetooth versions.
It’s highly likely that Bluetooth 6.0 and Channel Sounding will eventually bring UWB-like benefits to Android, but it looks like we’ll have to wait a few more years for that to happen.
UWB is a great tech, and it’s a shame it’s not better supported on Android
UWB is a great technology. It sips power, and its high accuracy and direction-based location tracking have been game changers, as proven by the success of the AirTag. But on Android, everything points toward UWB never really becoming a thing, with both Google and Android phone brands sharing part of the blame.
At least there’s Bluetooth 6.0’s Channel Sounding, but even that will take a few years to take off, since Bluetooth 6.0 trackers still aren’t widely implementing the feature, and only a handful of Android devices currently support Bluetooth 6.0. At the end of the day, it looks like precision tracking will stay out of reach for most Android users until Bluetooth 6.0 becomes mainstream.
