Tile
Did you know that Tile sells Bluetooth trackers for your cat? Why not just stick a little tracker on something cheap and attach it to your cat’s collar, you say? Well, that’s exactly what Tile did. At a time when Bluetooth tracking companies should be rethinking their approach and reputation with shoppers, a tile sticker on a cheap dog collar feels like a missed opportunity.
It took Tile a surprisingly long time to release an official pet tracker, but Tile for Cats finally became available Wednesday for $40 — $10 more than a Tile sticker’s solo MSRP. Tile’s announcement describes the product as the simplistic solution it is. It merely combines “tile decal with a silicone collar attachment.”
And that’s the first reason Tile for Cats doesn’t feel like an exciting new product – and it doesn’t look like it either. If someone wanted something that looked like a DIY pet tracker, they’d probably make one. That device would also probably say something nicer than “Tile,” like this GPS pet tracker on Hackaday that says “Squeak.”
Tile’s announcement called its cat tracker “comfortable,” “secure,” and “unobtrusive,” but the size of the product in shared images doesn’t scream cozy.
Still, Tile claims the product is designed to stay put “with dual attachment points and a special coating to prevent fur, dirt, and dust from sticking to it.”
But Tile for Cats doesn’t add exciting functionality that you can’t get by hacking your own solution. Considering Tile’s last major product announcement was its 2022 lineup of trackers with new features like ultra-wideband radio technology and extended battery life, Tile for Cats isn’t breaking new ground.
Missed opportunity for the best AirTags
It would have been a good time for Tile to announce something to get people excited about Bluetooth trackers. One of the reasons is the growing competition. AirTags are commonly used for pet tracking, despite Apple’s warning against the practice (dogs have eaten them and some have died), and AirTags’ inability to support multiple Apple IDs makes them unsuitable for pets with multiple owners. That leaves some pretty big gaps for Tile to fill, but it missed the mark.
Tile almost hit the mark by giving Life360 subscribers the ability to link Tile for Cat’s Tile Sticker for people in their “Circle” of family and friends to see, but that requires spending extra money on a Life360 subscription with features that someone might not need.
Plus, Tile for Cats only targets, you guessed it, cats, who tend to spontaneously play hide and seek. The tile sticker has its normal range of up to 250 feet, which is wider than AirTags (about 33 feet). But if you’re not in range of an AirTag you’re looking for, AirTags can tap into Apple’s massive Find My network, giving it much greater range, which is critical when tracking something with multiple legs. Tile still recommends its Tile Mate as a tracker for non-feline pets, though the device is also intended for general Bluetooth tracking. We’ve reached out to Life360 to ask if Tile for Cats is an effective solution for dogs and will update this piece if we hear back.
Meanwhile, Chipolo, which started selling trackers in 2013, was open to working with Apple to integrate Apple’s Find My into Chipolo’s product.
“It just comes down to: Do you want the customer to be happier with the larger network?… We decided this is better,” Chipolo co-founder Domen Barovic told TechCrunch earlier this year. He added that it is easier to replace Chipolo’s original search network “than trying to build a huge network”, which “is really hard”.
We’re not saying that Tile must necessarily work with Apple. Given the companies’ combative history, that can be rather… inconvenient. However, Tile should develop something as even smaller players find ways to expand their tracker networks. More pressingly, there are hints of Google-branded Bluetooth trackers, which could soon be using a huge network of Android-based devices.
