How long can you track a Pixel after a thief shuts it down? I tested to find out

Hardly any week goes by without me handing my husband a Bluetooth tracker and asking him to take it to work so I can test out remote location and finding. I’ve done it with AirTags, the Samsung Galaxy SmartTag2, Tile trackers, and dozens of Google Find My Device-compatible trackers like the Chipolo POP and Moto Tag. But when my Android Authority colleague Luka asked if we’d ever tested Google’s phone-off finding and how long it lasted, I drew a blank.

To test out Google’s offline-finding feature, I had to put my Pixel 9 Pro up against some controls. I used the iPhone 13 Pro Max as an Apple Find My controller and the Moto Tag as a comparison point for Google’s Find My Device network. After all, if the entire network wasn’t working as expected, then I couldn’t blame offline finding for not delivering an accurate location.

At 3 AM, right before heading to bed, I turned off the two phones with plenty of battery left (though this should work even if the main battery is depleted) and took the battery out of the Moto Tag. The next morning, my husband slipped them into his backpack and went to work. He put the Moto Tag battery back in around 11 AM, kept the two phones powered off, and I started checking where we were at.

The iPhone had been pinging its location all morning and was last seen two minutes ago right next to my husband’s work. The Moto Tag took a few minutes to catch up, but quickly showed a similar location. The Pixel 9 Pro? Last seen at 2:56 AM at home when I last powered it off. It hadn’t updated its location once in the nine hours since. Keep in mind that my husband carries a Pixel 7 Pro with the Find My Device network active and participating in all areas; he doesn’t have an iPhone.

I kept checking throughout the afternoon, and the situation remained the same. Clearly, Google’s Find My Device network was working, but something was stopping the Pixel 9 Pro from showing up.

Come 6:40 PM, when my husband was on his way back home, both the powered-off iPhone and the Moto Tag were sharing his updated location, while the Pixel 9 Pro stubbornly stuck to “last seen 2:56 AM.” Even by the time my husband was home and the Pixel 9 Pro was literally back next to me, it refused to update its location. It took until 8:15 PM for a miracle to happen and the Find My Device app to show me that the phone was seen at home.

It updated its location once more during the evening, then went off the map again. By comparison, the iPhone kept updating its location every couple of minutes until ~2 AM, i.e., it completed the promised 24 hours of offline finding that Apple mentions in its description of the feature.

I repeated this test the next day with similar results and this is where it occurred to me that my Pixel 9 Pro is running the Android 16 beta. I couldn’t find a filed bug around this issue, so I wasn’t sure if it was a known problem, a unique problem with my unit, or a general find when offline issue, regardless of beta software or not. But I didn’t want to dismiss Google’s efforts based on a phone running beta firmware, so I carried on my tests with a Pixel 9 Pro Fold on Android 15 stable.

More tests: Pixel 9 Pro Fold on Android 15 stable

To start off, I needed a quick test to make sure that the Pixel 9 Pro Fold would behave as expected when powered off. I powered it off on 6:22 PM one evening before heading out to Paris and packed it in my own backpack. It never left my side, so I wasn’t relying on any other phone or network to find it — just my own primary phone, the Pixel 9 Pro XL.

That quick test was a success. The Fold was detected near me throughout the evening, until 9 PM when I headed back home. So the feature works, in theory — at least when the phone doesn’t leave my side. Once again, I started blaming Android 16 beta for my early failure on the Pixel 9 Pro and was looking forward to testing things again.

For my third test, I turned off the Pixel 9 Pro Fold at 11 PM and sent it with my husband again the next day, March 28 (the date is important). I kept checking Find My Device to see if it had detected the phone, but it kept insisting it was last seen at home throughout the day. I swear, at this point, I thought I was going insane. How could the phone be “last seen,” i.e., actively updating its location at home, in the eastern suburbs, but also be physically with my husband halfway across Paris? I don’t know. I really asked him to double-check twice that he had the Fold with him, and not some other phone.

By this point, I had just given up on trying to see if Find My Device works with powered-off phones. I turned off the app, didn’t check anything again, and just went on with my life. I had other tests and more important things to do than to keep giving second chances to a feature that doesn’t work. A few days later, as I spotted the powered-off Pixel 9 Pro Fold at my desk, I thought, “Hey, see if anything changed with that location.” And this is when… You’d think I was lying if I didn’t have a screenshot for this.

Ok, so allow me to explain. On March 28, when the phone was actually with my husband in the middle of Paris, it told me it was “seen” at home throughout the day. But two days later, Find My Device tells me that the phone was actually seen two days earlier at 12:12 PM in Paris, right where it actually, physically was. What happened there, why the overlap, why the Schrödinger cat situation, and why the buggy location while checking, and the correct location later? I don’t know.

If I had really lost my phone and not given it to the safe hands of my husband, I would’ve never been able to find it. Or by the time I did, it would’ve been too late.

Also, notice that the last time the phone’s location was updated was nearly 13 hours after it was powered off — far from the iPhone’s 24 hours of active location.

You can tell that by then, I was more than frustrated with this little experiment, but I decided to give it one more go, just for the pleasure (read: torture) of it all. I powered off my Pixel 9 Pro Fold at 8:14 PM on April 10 and took it with me while shopping for new garden equipment. I knew that, once again, I was giving it an unfair advantage by keeping next to me, but I wanted to see if it’d bug out even with that.

The first few minutes were peachy. The phone was detected near me — I could even see the last battery level and operator it was connected to. But half an hour later, the location stopped getting updated even though it was literally in my backpack. I wasn’t in a remote location either, if you’re wondering about the privacy aspect of Find My Device; I went to a big department store, took a crowded bus, and waited in the middle of a busy square for another bus. For the next four hours, until past midnight, the last seen location was 8:28 PM, and Find My Device wouldn’t tell me that the phone was still near me, even though I had already returned home with it in my backpack.

After all of this, I reached out to my colleague Mishaal Rahman who’s been covering Android 15’s offline finding feature since it first showed up as a teaser and right until it was announced and then rolled out to other phones. I asked him if he’d actually tested it thoroughly and the answer was that he did a few times, it worked for him, and he’s seen feedback from other people that said it works, too.

Everyone keeps telling me that the Find My Device network has improved a lot too, and even though I’ve noticed that, I still run across more reliability issues than I’d like for a network that’s supposed to help me find my lost items in a bind.

Maybe it’s a weaker network around Paris, I tell myself. Maybe it’s my phones, though I’ve clearly tried this on two Pixels already. Maybe it’s Android 16 beta on the Pixel 9 Pro where I first tested it out. Maybe it’s the privacy aspect stopping the network from updating the location of a device when there aren’t many people nearby. Maybe, maybe, maybe…

But the reality is that, in my last test on April 10, my Pixel 9 Pro Fold on Android 15 stable stopped updating its location fifteen minutes after being turned off, even though it was still in my backpack. (I’m not even going to mention the whole March 28 head-scratching discrepancy of home-not-home, followed by a correct location two days later.) No beta, network, or account issue could explain the April 10 unreliable behavior. It’s supposed to just be Bluetooth, from the powered-off Fold to my own, primary, turned-on Pixel 9 Pro XL. If that simple link isn’t working, can I trust it out in the world with a thief?