A rare worthwhile Android tracker

It’s become increasingly difficult to lose keys. I can’t remember the last time I had to tear through my house, flipping couch cushions and shaking out coat pockets, looking for my car keys — usually on a morning when I was already running late.

We have the luxury of smart trackers to thank for that. Tile is one of the oldest names in the Bluetooth tracking game, and the brand just released its 2024 lineup of trackers. This includes the Tile Pro, which promises a longer battery life, further Bluetooth range, and more dynamic integration than we’ve ever seen in a Tile device.

Price, availability, and specs

As with the 2022 generation of Tile trackers, the Pro is the priciest, clocking in at $35 per tracker. Assuming Tile offers the new collection in the same two- or four-pack bundles as it did with older versions, you could save a few bucks by buying the Pro in bulk, assuming you need more than one.

Two subscriptions are associated with using the Tile Pro: the subscription to Tile itself and Life360. More on what each subscription offers later, but for now, here’s the price breakdown:

Where is the new 2024 Tile Pro sold? As of the publishing of this review, I didn’t have any information on where you could buy the 2024 Pro outside of Tile’s storefront. However, Tile devices are generally widely available. They’re sold at retailers like Target, Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, and Best Buy, so the newest Tile trackers will likely make it to the shelves of your favorite store soon enough.

What’s good about the 2024 Tile Pro?

This kind of Bluetooth range is rare

The Tile Pro 2024 boasts an impressive 500-foot Bluetooth range, which is unrivaled by most Bluetooth trackers. The Pebblebee Clip comes close, with a range of 150 meters/490 feet, but other than that, Bluetooth trackers reaching more than 250 to 300 feet are scarce.

Of course, real-time performance matters a lot more than on-paper specs, especially if there’s a claim to practically unprecedented capability. So, I put the Pro’s Bluetooth range to the test. I stood outside my house with my phone (specifically, I used a Pixel 9 for this test) and sent my partner 500 feet down the sidewalk, or just under one-tenth of a mile. This was a clear shot with no major obstructions, and the Pebblebee pinged to my Pixel (and vice versa) without a hitch. The ping only took about three seconds to come through, and the app rated the Bluetooth signal as strong.

How often are you beaming a signal through 500 feet of clear, uninterrupted pathway, though? I moved further up to my house, on the porch underneath an eave. The new angle meant that the path from my phone to the Tile Pro was interrupted by multiple vehicles, the corner of my house, and several mature trees. The tracker’s signal dropped to moderate, and we didn’t achieve a successful ping until my partner walked about 25 feet closer. Even with the shortened distance, I was impressed with the Tile’s connectivity spanning almost two residential blocks.

Having been primarily an AirTag user over the years, I worried about the density of the Tile network when it came to long-range tracking. As you can see in the screenshot above, while traveling on a Minneapolis interstate, the Tile Pro pinged between every five and 10 minutes along this route. According to Tile, now that the brand is owned by Life360, Bluetooth-enabled phones using Life360 can also ping Tile trackers, regardless of whether or not the phone is associated with Tile’s app or trackers. Theoretically, this expands the Tile network’s reach signficantly, but this will still depend on your location.

The Tile Pro 2024 uses a standard CR2032 button battery, with an average battery life of three years — a value I really can’t complain about with competing trackers offering between one and two years at best. The Samsung Galaxy SmartTag 2, for instance, uses the same common battery and only promises up to 700 days (a month shy of two years).

With the Tile Pro 2024, you can now quickly contact your family and the authorities in the event of an emergency — a significant perk of Tile joining Life360. The tracker’s multifunction button can be programmed to send an SOS to the people designated in your Circle (what Life360 calls your household or list of trusted loved ones) and law enforcement.

For obvious reasons, I didn’t test this function to completion, so I don’t know exactly what the alert looks like on the receiving end besides including your location. The render below, provided by Tile, shows an example of what this notification would likely look like.

A few more positive notes — the Tile 2024 collection may not work with Google Find My Device, but I did add the Tile Pro to my Google Home and was able to ping the tracker via voice assistant. It doesn’t integrate into the Google Home app, so you’ll just have to trust that the connection is there. Also, Tile states that the 2024 Pro is their loudest tracker yet. I don’t have every single Tile model from 2022, so I can’t test that claim across the board, but the Pro is definitely louder than its 2024 siblings. I heard the tracker’s chime while outside testing its Bluetooth range — from 500 feet away.

What’s bad about the 2024 Tile Pro?

Not much to complain about, outside Find My’s compatibility absence

The biggest sacrifice you make when choosing Tile trackers over other brands or native offerings from Google, Apple, and Samsung is not leaning on the major Find My Device networks. However, the Tile network has had plenty of time to expand and mature, so I can’t say you’re missing out on much by using the Tile network over first-party options — when it comes to Android, anyway.

Google Find My Device may have just rolled out this year, but it was a rocky start, earning lukewarm feedback when Android Police reviewers tested several new trackers on the Android Find My network, like the Pebblebee Clip.

Samsung has its own native trackers, but whether the Tile Pro is a better choice for Galaxy users is a case-by-case question. As of August, Tile’s crowd-powered tracking network is the second-biggest, second only to Apple (according to The New York Times). So, while some Samsung users may prefer their native tags for the faster setup, compatibility with SmartThings Find, where you may already be tracking a Samsung phone, earbuds, or tablet as well, and ultra-wideband (UWB) support for heightened short-range location accuracy, others may still opt in to Tile instead, to take advantage of the more comprehensive crowd tracking web.

There’s still no contest between Apple and Tile’s networks, though. Apple perfectly set up its Find My network to secure its position as the most effective crowdsourced tracking network, for now anyway. This is because Apple users automatically opt in to tracking participation, a tracker only needs to ping off of one Apple device to send a location to the user (Google Find My, in contrast, requires three unique device pings), and the feature list is relatively robust even in the absence of subscription fees.

Now for the Tile Pro 2024 complaints. Earlier, I talked about the Tile Pro 2024’s single multifunction button. Its two functions are pinging your phone and sending an emergency SOS. What’s really frustrating is that the Pro can’t be programmed to do both at the same time. The button only responds to triple presses, so you must pick one or the other: triple-press to send an SOS,or triple-press to ping your phone. To change the function, you have to go into the Life360 app. I understand using triple-press for the SOS messages to avoid accidental activations, but letting users also ping their phone with a single press can’t be that big of a deal, right?

Lastly, a quick aesthetic thing to point out: despite the 2024 Tile Mate hitting shelves in four fun, vibrant colorways, if you want the more capable Tile Pro, you’re stuck with white or black. We don’t even get the Mountain Top gray color that the 2022 Pro came in.

The subscription disclaimer

Most of what I really liked the most about the 2024 Tile collection — the SOS alert, the stolen item reimbursement, the smart alerts when you leave a Tiled item behind, and the 30-day location history — are all paid features, locked behind either Tile or Life360’s subscriptions.

It’s quite common to expect a monthly fee for 24/7 access to emergency services, but with the free Life360 plan, you can still send SOS alerts. They’ll only notify your Circle and emergency contacts, not local authorities (which, if you’ve ever had a false alarm, may actually be preferable).

You don’t need the Tile or Life360 subscriptions to use a 2024 Tile device. You can still locate a Tile within Bluetooth range or wait for it to ping on the Tile network if it’s outside the Bluetooth radius. Many users may not need all that Life360 and Tile’s paid subscriptions offer. It all comes down to how worried you are about theft and potential crime (traveling, living in shared housing like a dorm, etc.)

Should you buy it?

Android = Yes, Apple = No

I am excited to see where Tile goes in the next year or two. It would be nice to see a UWB-enabled option from Tile — the Ultra, Tile’s first UWB-capable tracker, was announced on 2021 and then sort of shuffled to the side as the brand joined Life360. In a 2024 earnings call, Tile discussed the possibility of a tracker that utilizes different location services as its battery depletes, ultimately relying on satellite positioning in its final critically-low-battery period.

It’s frustrating to see Tile trackers ensnared in not one but two subscription webs, but they’re still functional — albeit incredibly simplified — without either of these subscriptions. The Tile Pro is a smart tracking solution for Android users, unless you’re stubbornly determined to wait for the Google Find My network to be polished up. If I were you, I wouldn’t hold my breath — not when the Tile Pro, an outstanding tracker backed by an established network, is right in front of you.

To the Apple users out there, just put some fresh batteries in your AirTag and wait for the second generation of Apple’s tracker, which we hope to see next year. If Apple devices were still part of my daily regime, I’d stick with my AirTags. Despite the Bluetooth range on AirTags being significantly shorter than the 2024 Tile Pro (only about 200 feet), the reach of Apple Find My cannot be ignored.