Life360 Buys AirTag Competitor Tile

Family tracking software company Life360 just bought Tile, the maker of Bluetooth trackers, for $205 million. Tile has been around since 2012, but the purchase comes less than a year after both Apple and Samsung released competing trackers with tighter integration into their own phone software.

Life360 also recently purchased Jiobit, a maker of cellular-based trackers for children and pets, making the company a real powerhouse in the world of tracking gadgets. Tile had just raised another $40 million this September.

Tile was long known as the go-to company for finding your keys, but the Apple and Samsung solutions are far better at finding devices when they're out of Bluetooth range, because they leverage the huge number of Apple and Samsung phones to find them. Life360 says that leveraging all the phones running its family-finding software will increase Tile's finding network by 10x, letting Tile compete considerably better.

Life360 has about 33 million installs and around 850,000 paying customers, the company press release says, and the acquisition will boost its paying customer base to 1.6 million. Tile trackers are free to use but have a "premium" subscription plan that adds item insurance and free battery replacements.

Life360's apps will now be able to track family members with the app installed on their phones; with Jiobit cellular trackers, which give real-time location wherever you are; and with Tiles using their Bluetooth network.

Tile complained to the EU that Apple was engaging in anti-competitive behavior by giving its own apps better default permissions than third-party apps, and later it complained AirTags got earlier access to "ultra-wideband" direction finding than third parties had, according to TechCrunch. Tile plans to release its first UWB-powered tracker, the Tile Ultra, in 2022; Apple's AirTags and Samsung's SmartTag+ models both support UWB right now.

Apple hasn't released details of AirTag sales, but one analyst back in April estimated the company would sell about 31 million of the $25 trackers this year.

About Our Expert

Sascha Segan

Former Lead Analyst, Mobile

My Experience

I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also wrote a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsessed about phones and networks.

My Areas of Expertise

US and Canadian mobile networks
Mobile phones released in the US
iPads, Android tablets, and ebook readers
Mobile hotspots
Big data features such as Fastest Mobile Networks and Best Work-From-Home Cities

The Technology I Use

Being cross-platform is critical for someone in my position. In the US, the mobile world is split pretty cleanly between iOS and Android. So I think it's really important to have Apple, Android and Windows devices all in my daily orbit.

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 for work and a 2021 Apple MacBook Pro for personal use. My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, although I'm probably going to move to an Android foldable. Most of my writing is either in Microsoft OneNote or a free notepad app called Notepad++. Number crunching, which I do often for those big data stories, is via Microsoft Excel, DataGrip for MySQL, and Tableau.

In terms of apps and cloud services, I use both Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive heavily, although I also have iCloud because of the three Macs and three iPads in our house. I subscribe to way too many streaming services.

My primary tablet is a 12.9-inch, 2020-model Apple iPad Pro. When I want to read a book, I've got a 2018-model flat-front Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. My home smart speakers run Google Home, and I watch a TCL Roku TV. And Verizon Fios keeps me connected at home.

My first computer was an Atari 800 and my first cell phone was a Qualcomm Thin Phone. I still have very fond feelings about both of them.

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