I love my Tile(s), but since the AirTag and now Android networks now feature the same capability, I feel their model is dead in the water since they don't own the platform and can't compete on the installed base.
They should have sold out (edit: to a mobile platform company, either Google or Apple) while they had the chance.
They did sell out, they were acquired by Life360 a while ago.
edit: I don't think Google would have had much to gain by acquiring Tile, the actual technology is very simple, their moat was just the fact that they had the largest install base of tracking apps on Android. Google could, and did, just rug-pull them by pushing their own network out to every Android device with Play Services (so nearly all of them).
The only thing Tile really has going for it now is that their trackers can be used with both Android and iOS simultaneously, if you have devices in both ecosystems.
As someone who owns about eight of them, I don't see how you could love Tile. They have a ridiculous profit margin and the company likes to engage in asshole practices like making it so getting a notification when you lose connection with a tile is a fucking monthly subscription. Companies that charge for things which cost them literally zero dollars deserve to burn to the ground.
99.9% of the time the network doesn’t matter because the item isn’t lost, I just don’t remember where I left it, and it’s either in range or wherever Tile shows the last known location to be. And even if it is lost, Tile app remembers it as being at the last place where I had it and my phone, which is practically always where I left it.
Airtag surely has better coverage, since like 50% of phones are helping, but the one time I actually lost something Tile found it. Someone had moved it so the location must have been uploaded by another Tile user. I use my Tiles daily to find my AirPods or a key set, I’ve used it once in years to find that (my Airpods case) when it fell out of my pocket in a park.
Tile is louder and easier to hear. Tile has several form factors, Airtag only has one, and honestly, any tile form factor is better than Airtags. I swear they picked the worst possible shape for it, it just has to make whatever you put it in bulge. You have to buy some sort of case to even use it most of the time, whereas a Tile can pop directly onto your key ring.
Airtag can’t ring my phone. I do that frequently.
I’ve used both extensively, I’ll keep buying Tiles. Or maybe one of these newer ones. I’d go so far as to say Airtag is only better at finding something that’s been stolen, and that’s just a tiny percent of the use cases. Tile is better in every other way.
AirTags are not better in one very important way: they don't prevent theft. They will notify thieves that they are hidden in a valuable item that they are stealing if the thief carries an iPhone.
Tile has a feature where you can submit your info and sign some sort of extra contract stating that you won't use your Tile for stalking/illegal activity, and you can actually hide a Tile in your bike frame and it can be used to find your bike if it goes missing. AirTags are useless for this because Apple doesn't want them used for stalking.
How do hidden trackers "prevent" theft? If a thief steals your bike and is notified that it's being tracked, they're probably much more likely to abandon it somewhere, at which point you can recover it. This seems like a safer bet than trying to hunt them down yourself. (It should go without saying the police are not going to go get your bicycle back for you even if you do hand them the GPS coordinates.)
It’s a massive deterrence. LoJack has been in business since 1986 for a reason.
Also, the attitude of “don’t go and get your stuff back yourself, it’s not safe” is just castrated cowardice and only emboldens thieves. Thieves should be afraid of both law enforcement and vigilante response. Better society when both are on the table.
A hidden device can't prevent theft. It takes visibility to be a deterrent.
For instance: One or more well-hidden surveillance cameras cannot ever deter anyone from doing anything. However: One or more cameras placed out in the open can do so. (They don't even have to be functional cameras to be a deterrence.)
LoJack isn't a deterrence. It is instead a way to react after a theft has already occured.
The AirTag, meanwhile: It also can't prevent or deter the theft -- if a thief is going to steal a thing, they're going to steal it whether it has an AirTag hidden somewhere or not.
And when an iPhone-using thief is alerted to the presence of that AirTag tracker, they have options beyond just ditching the bike: They can make the AirTag make noise, and also use Precision Finding to draw an arrow on the screen of their phone that helps them to locate the AirTag so it can be destroyed.
(This is a deliberate anti-stalking feature on the part of Apple.
Tracking stolen goods is fundamentally incompatible with anti-stalking measures: There cannot be both things in the same ecosystem, since if a person can silently track their [stolen?] bicycle, then they can also silently track a living human being.)
Thieves will begin to expect it to be there some of the time, after sufficient police/vigilante response. And perhaps it will be hard to find. Hence, deterrence.
Cars are stolen far less often than they would be otherwise partially due to technology like LoJack. Did you grow up in the US? Steering wheel locks used to be on every other parked car. Immobilizers and LoJack made them a thing you buy for your weekend classic car only.
Immobilizers had an order-of-magnitude larger impact on car theft than LoJack. It used to be relatively trivial to start a car without the keys once inside. Now (disregarding certain Hyundai/Kia models) it’s essentially impossible to start without the key.
You lose credibility right there. No need for such bullshit it you actually have a point. Performative machismo is completely useless.
> Thieves should be afraid of both law enforcement and vigilante response. Better society when both are on the table.
lol no. Actually, what the hell are you thinking? Mob justice is not justice at all. What happens when someone decides you are a thief (or rapist, or murderer) just because they don’t like the look of you or would like to have your car very much?
This does not frighten thieves; this frightens people other people don’t like. I mean, we’ve had plenty of examples in recent history. I would take the risk of losing my bike every now and then instead of the risk of being lynched any day.
If you hide the tag in a way that it can’t be removed (locked to the bike etc) then what option does the thief have? They might actually decide not to steal the item!
one way they aren't better. You have the tile but can't find your damn phone. Sure there is 'find my' but the little button on the tile that causes the phone to chime was actually pretty handy.
I imagine apple removed it because tags are not paired to phones (like tiles) but instead to the whole account. If you were to push the theoretical button on the airtag your entire house would probably set to chiming (apple tv, homepod, all the phones and ipads on the account all the macs...)
> If you were to push the theoretical button on the airtag your entire house would probably set to chiming (apple tv, homepod, all the phones and ipads on the account all the macs...)
There is a simple solution to this: if you press the hypothetical AirTag button, trigger the closest iPhone attached to your account, and then you can manually pick any specific device in Find My as usual from the iPhone.
AirTags only come in a single size and shape that only makes sense for larger container objects. Tile makes a flat credit-card sized variant that you can slide in your wallet, and the adapters required to put an AirTag on a keychain is pretty ridiculous in comparison to the tiny variants you can get from Tile with a built-in hole for this purpose.
(Also: AFAIK the "large"--not really, in comparison to the AirTag + adapter, lol--Tile Pro variants have a noticeably longer range than AirTags.) Honestly, the only thing, to me, missing from Tile is the direction arrow finder, which is certainly useful, and yet... the speakers on the Tile are much much better so it just doesn't matter so much?
(BTW: it is extremely stupid that that arrow only works in two directions. I waste so much time following the arrow only to realize I need to go upstairs -- I live in a two story apartment with a bedroom and an office above my kitchen and living room: it isn't larger than my friends's apartments, but it is really nice having two floors -- that I am only doing because the sound isn't loud enough on AirTags.)
Frankly, the whole argument for AirTags being inherently better is merely that they have a "bigger network", but for most of my objects I am not scavenging around town looking for then, nor am I ever going to be chasing some thief around the city in my car looking to steal it back, hoping to catch up to them before they disable or throw out the tracker... that vigilante justice idea associated with this product category is just a crazy pipe dream.
Instead, I am pretty much always just trying to figure out which pair of pants I left my wallet in today, or on which shelf I left my keys: I would actually be much happier with a purely local product that only responded to encrypted pings from my personal phone and only even did that when I actively ask it to (as despite using both Tile and AirTags for years now the "you left your item behind" notifications have only happened before I myself noticed once or twice in a way which was helpful... it just doesn't ping often enough, with either product, to be maximally useful).
And looking at the replies to this, I have learned AirTags are actually missing what is to me a glorious feature of Tile: that I can push a button on my keys and find my phone in reverse. I hadn't noticed this lack before as I am only using AirTags in large objects I don't keep on my person (which makes their notifications really annoying as the UI fails to eat old ones even when I walk back to my object... this seems very fixable), but I don't want to have to buy an Apple Watch just to have a way to find my phone :/.
That's cool! I am looking at this and seeing another issue with AirTag: I actively use the feature on Tile where I can use the Tile on my keychain to find my phone by pushing the button, and I guess AirTags is entirely missing that feature.
The issue is not that they have a well-integrated ecosystem, it's that they build features into their products that only their other products are allowed to use. There would be no need for action if Apple designed a popular ecosystem that all of your devices could participate in.
This is irrelevant. The comment was about Apple’s preferred way of locating lost phones was Apple Watch so they don’t support pinging it from an AirTag. This has nothing to do with 3rd party support, and in fact 3rd parties (Tile) do have the feature Apple doesn’t for their item trackers.
Apple not allowing 3rd parties use of their proprietary technology is not the entirety of the DoJ’s argument. For example, their claims about Messages and Apple Watch are about support Apple hasn’t built, not about what they prevent 3rd parties from building.
something i initially missed as well but like .. if you pushed the button on your airtag it would probably start all your apple devices to beeping. The tag is associated with your account, not your phone like with tile.
Thanks! For the card-shaped one I might actually try that one out and switch. I actually was just adding a thing to my comment about how the location finding thing is certainly useful but not as good as a loud speaker as it doesn't support a Z axis for some silly reason, so I don't really care. But, honestly, the flat versions of the Tile have an issue where the speaker wires can get broken slightly by flexing in the wallet (I took one apart to diagnose this once) and so I could see trying a competitor, as this is the same thickness!!
It's weird to me that people actually have this problem often enough that they go out of their way to research and buy a product to try to solve it. I literally never lose my phone or wallet.
There's like three different places I put my phone in different areas of the house, and only one where I put my wallet and keys as soon as I enter.
I would like an airtag to put on my bike or laptop or other high value item to track it if stolen, but I'm not about to buy Apple stuff.
I had found what I consider to be the perfect wallet and while they did add an RFID lining it was one I could remove. I have bought multiple of them as backups and likely will purchase a few more ;P.
The only time I've used RF-blocking gear for privacy or security was when I had a little Faraday pouch for my old flip phone a million years ago[0].
It was nice-enough case for my phone and it primarily kept the phone from getting beat up by other pocket-stuff that would happen in a workday. But it also had two compartments: One was shielded all around by conductive fabric and this made a fairly good Faraday cage, and for the other one layer of that conductive fabric would be pushed aside so that the Faraday cage was incomplete (and thus largely non-functional).
It gave me a choice, and that choice worked well.
I think I paid $3 for it back in the day from DealExtreme (which was a lot like Temu is today, except shipping normally took months instead of days or weeks).
Is choice not a thing in modern RFID-blocking wallets?
[0: There was a time when my company felt it was useful to track people with their company-provided cell phones. I didn't mind that during the workday, so much, but we were also encouraged to use these as our personal phones if we chose to, and strongly encouraged to keep them with us 24/7 so we would be reachable.
And I didn't mind being reachable most or all of the time and I certainly enjoyed not having my own cell phone bill back then, but I did not like being tracked 24/7: Sometimes, I wanted to do my own private shit on my own time without being snooped on.
I could tell the tracking app to exit, and that did work, but doing so sent a notification to my completely stupid, abusive manager -- who would variously either call to ask why I did that, or just silently turn it back on remotely (which the system permitted).
And I did not (and do not) think that, as a professional, I needed to excuse my choice to have privacy at any given time. (Given my own role in the company I had access to this tracking data as well, but I'm not the abusive type.)
So, the solution was simple: Normally, the phone was in the non-shielded part of the case. And when I dropped it into the completely-surrounded Faraday portion instead, the phone just simply dropped off and silently stopped providing updates.
This worked 100%, and while I refer to them as separate compartments to aid in functional clarity, the design of this case didn't really take up any more space than any other phone-case would have.]
Insane that this seems to be getting downvoted (I assume? It's faded to light gray) just because you are daring to question the superiority of the Apple Solution.
I had a number of Tiles over the years and really wanted to like them, but really didn't. I lose stuff infrequently enough that the battery in the tiles would die 2-10 times before I was likely to lose my keys/wallet. The TV remote, the tile was something my son (the primary loser) would fiddle with constantly and destroy. I carried a dead Tile Pro on my keys probably 95% of the time I carried it.
The one place I'd really like a tile is on my Pixel Buds, but a Tile is a significant %age of the size of the case, and again not something I need super frequently.
Do the Pixel Buds not have a Find feature? I have the same experience as you with Tile, but I use the "Find" feature on my iPhone to locate my AirPods all the time.
They do, but it doesn't work very well. For example, if I go into "find my device" it says my buds are at the gym. When I lost them a few months ago it said they were at the hospital, but I eventually found them at home.
> I feel their model is dead in the water since they don't own the platform and can't compete on the installed base.
Yeah, this functionality is the ultimate "network effect" model. While my most common use case for Tile is walking around my house with my phone to see where I've misplaced my keys, the other (and more advertised) case is that if I lose my keys while out and about, I can get notified of their location if anyone else with the Tile app installed is near my keys.
The iOS and Android platforms have a huge advantage because they don't depend on having any app installed - that previous sentence just becomes "I can get notified of their location if anyone else with an iOS device (for AirTags) or Android device (for this new functionality) is near my keys." That's huge, because it means there are fewer places that won't have anyone with those phones. And now that Android has this functionality, I see more and more people switching to it from Tile, which means the Tile network will get smaller and be even less useful for the Tile users who remain.
> if anyone else with an iOS device (for AirTags) or Android device (for this new functionality) is near my keys.
I wonder just how quickly this'll roll out over the Android devices in the wild? It needs Android 9+ it seems, which is about 80-85% of the devices from memory. I wonder if it also needs vendor updates? How quickly will Samsung/Huawei et al provide Android updates with this feature? (And will vendors be able to choose to block it?)
It's rolling out as part of Google Play Services, which is updated out of band from Android itself so just about every device should get it without any action from the manufacturer, aside from the small minority of devices running de-Googled versions of Android.
Yeah I can't really see where they go from here, which is a big shame personally because I got a bunch of very cheap battery replaceable ones years back that are still going strong.
Also got a four pack of long dead gen 2s that were pretty easy to cut apart, rejig for replaceable batteries and embed into a few items.
No, the AirTag ecosystem and Google Find My ecosystem are still separate things. Google and Apple did cooperate to standardize stalker detection though, so your iPhone will alert you if you have an unknown Google tag following you, or vice versa if your Android phone notices an unknown AirTag.
They should have sold out (edit: to a mobile platform company, either Google or Apple) while they had the chance.