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Merry (almost) Christmas! As we close out another year, it’s time for one of our favorite seasonal activities – the TechRadar Santa tracker! Using the two most popular trackers, NORAD and Google, we bring you live updates as St. Nick makes his way around the world.
Tracking Santa is now a beloved tradition, but it all started by accident nearly 70 years ago. As legend has it, a Sears catalog accidentally printed the Colorado Springs “Continent Air Defense Command (CONAD) Center” phone number instead of a Santa hotline in Christmas 1955, and began receiving phone calls from kids hoping Klaus to speak for yourself.
CONAD saw an opportunity for a little festive fun and began publishing press releases each year about Santa’s whereabouts. The tradition caught on and CONAD handed over the reins to NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) after it was founded in 1958.
While NORAD’s Santa tracker has traditionally been the best resource for tracking Santa’s whereabouts, there are now a plethora of ways for families and big kids to track down Kris Kringle.
The best of these was created by Google, which released its own Santa Tracker in 2004. It offers a completely different experience than NORAD, but is still just as much fun.
Santa Tracker: Norad vs. Google
You have two main choices when it comes to following Santa – both offer different ways to follow jolly old St. Nick, but it depends on the experience you’re looking for.
Norad Santa Tracker (opens in new tab)
The original way to follow Santa and some say the best. This website, run by the US military, combines grumpy colonels presenting a video about Santa Claus with live, up-to-date information about where the man in the big red suit is.
You can download the app on the App Store (opens in new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in new tab)and from there you’ll be presented with some mini-games to play and be able to follow the progress of the presentation live.
It’s a much more rudimentary experience than other trackers out there, and it lacks a lot of polish and website design.
However, it’s also the most popular and has a heartwarming history – as well as an army of volunteers ready to take your call to find out where Santa is.
NORAD also added an AI chatbot called Radar to help you spot Santa if you don’t feel like all that talking, which is kind of nice. But if you can put in the effort, dialing +1 (877) HI-NORAD is also enough.
How to play the Santa games on mobile
Every year when we publish this guide, people wonder how to play the games on mobile when the big ‘PLAY!’ button in the center of the screen sometimes fails and just gives you random games or video anyway. Well, just go to the Santa Tracker (opens in new tab) site in a mobile browser, click on the three lines in the top left corner and see all the games you can play. (Note: the ‘install’ option, which says ‘Add to home screen’, does not work on iPhones).
A more recent addition to Google’s Santa Tracker mix, it has been running since 2004 and combines the power of Google Maps with the smart knowledge of where Santa is.
While Google doesn’t have the same satellite tracking power as NORAD, one has to assume that the search giant has made a deal with the North Pole to find out where it is in real time using search and radar and lazers and… things. Don’t ask us to interpret the magic.
Backing up the Santa Tracker, there are a slew of mini-games to play, as well as a month-long website that encourages kids to learn how to code while encountering a winter wonderland.
There are some pro-Google tools in this Santa Tracker – the Quick Draw game is designed to teach Google’s image recognition Tensor how to improve, which feels a little strange – but it’s a beautifully designed site and arguably the most visually accessible way to to follow Santa Claus.
You can download the app from the Google Play Storebut in our view, the mobile site is just as good and accessible to iPhone users, plus Google’s Santa Tracker also has the best and easiest to use desktop experience.