This is Julienne. In addition to being elegant, fluffy, and a perfect housemate, she’s also exactly what people mean when they say “scaredy-cat.” She hid for almost a week when we first brought her home. Every time visitors come by, she silently squirrels out of sight. And when we moved houses, as soon as we put her down, she sprinted to find the smallest, darkest, safest spot, from which she didn’t move or make a sound until she felt completely safe.
As a result, we’re terrified that if she ever runs off, she’ll be hiding in a bush six feet from us and we’ll never find her. She’ll stay a small, silent bundle—all but invisible. So, in my cat-dad paranoia, I hung a Tile bluetooth tracker on her collar, and one has remained there for four years, through multiple product iterations and designs.
Our pick
Tile Mate (2020)
The best Bluetooth tracker for Android users
The Tile Mate has a long range, is quite loud, and gives you a better chance of finding your lost stuff than other non-Apple trackers.
Buying Options
*At the time of publishing, the price was $24.
Tiles are small Bluetooth trackers that come in a variety of sizes, including a tiny dot, a little square, and a credit-card-sized option for your wallet. All of the different shapes do essentially the same thing. If you’re near enough for your phone to connect to them over Bluetooth, you can trigger an audio alarm to come from the tracker, so you can find the keys buried in yesterday’s coat.
If you’re not close, the app will show you the last place your phone connected to the tracker. You can mark the Tile as “lost,” and the app will tap into its network of other users, alerting you if someone comes close enough to pinpoint your tracker’s location.
Handily, you can also use a Tile to locate something that may get frequently misplaced—your phone. Simply press a button on the tracker to have your device squawk at you from across the room, since you can never remember where you put the damn thing.
A Tile Slim in my partner’s purse helped us find the bag when she left it in a café in Liverpool, England, even when we didn’t have local SIM cards. A Tile Pro is discreetly hidden on the frame of my bike, in case anything happens to it (again).
As for Julienne? She currently has a Tile Sticker on her collar tag. Though we’ve never had to use it to find her, the Tile has been a convenient way to figure out which drawer of clothes she’s burrowed her way into this time. And because the Sticker is only about 5 grams, we’re not worried about it weighing down her collar.
The Tile also suits our needs better than a dedicated pet GPS tracker. Those are more expensive, much larger and heavier, require tracking subscriptions, and need to be charged regularly. With a Tile? You place it where you want and more or less forget about it—at least until the battery runs out, which is definitely a downside. A GPS tracker will update more quickly, and it doesn’t rely on a network of other users to be near you—which makes it more suited to a far-roaming dog than to a lazy, housebound cat.
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