Three and a half years after Family Locator App Life360 acquired the Lost Item Tracker tile for $205 million, the two services were eventually fully integrated. On Wednesday, Life360 announced that Tile's item discovery feature, a competitor to Apple's Airtag and other Bluetooth-based trackers, will be available within the main app.
This update allows users to see where their families are in real time and valuables such as wallets, keys, bags and other items. This change also helps centralize the individual user base of the two apps by pushing Tile users to adopt the Life360 app as their main tracking tool.
A representative from the company told TechCrunch that the Integrated Services will begin rolling out on Wednesday and reach all users in the coming weeks.
As the rollout progresses, tile users will immediately receive a message to the app leading them to life360, while life360 users will see a new section to track items under the People and Pet section in the app's location tab.
Tiles with Life360 family members will also be displayed in real time on the in-app map. If an item is lost, users can view location history for up to 2 days for free. Subscription plan users can access location history for longer periods, gold and platinum users can view for 30 days, while silver members can access it for the past 7 days. Silver members can now access emergency shipping services via the tile SOS button or the Life360 app. (This works only with 2024 tile devices.)
Additionally, Life360 users will be able to receive auto-push notifications immediately when items attached to a tile device are left behind. The company says it expects the feature to arrive in the coming weeks.
Just before this update, Life360 redirected its Tile.com domain to Life360.com.
The company doesn't show any indications about whether or not it plans to discontinue the standalone tile app, so it won't want to move until it can move users to flagship products. However, it may no longer be pointless to continue running both applications after the Tile feature is fully replicated in Life360 apps. (Contacted for comment, a spokesperson said the tile app has not been deprecated “at this time.”
Life360 said it would integrate tiles into its main app in 2022. At the time, it said that if all Life360 users were added to the tiles, it would be the biggest Finding network. However, given the slower integration of services, the opportunity may have passed. Additionally, competitors like Chipolo have launched their own lost item tracker that works directly on both Apple and Google and Google's built-in Finding networks.
Although Life360 does not share the number of users of the tile app, it should be noted that the flagship product has 83.7 million global monthly active users, of which 45.3 million are based in the US.