Over three and a half years after family locator app Life360 acquired lost item tracker Tile for $205 million, the two services are finally fully integrated. On Wednesday, Life360 announced that the item-finding capabilities of Tile, a competitor to Apple’s AirTag and other Bluetooth-based trackers, are now available from inside its main app.
The update means users will now be able to see where family members are in real time, as well as their valuables, like their wallet, keys, bags, and other items. The change will also help to centralize the separate user bases for the two apps by pushing Tile’s users to adopt the Life360 app as their main tracking tool.
A company representative told TechCrunch that the integrated services will begin rolling out on Wednesday and will reach all users over the next few weeks.
As the rollout progresses, Tile users will soon see a message in their app directing them to Life360, while Life360 users will see a new section for tracking their items below the people and pets section on the Location tab of the app.
Tiles that are with a Life360 family member will also appear on the in-app map in real time. If an item is lost, users can view up to two days of location history for free. Subscription plan users can access longer periods of location history, with Gold and Platinum users able to see 30 days, while Silver members can access the past seven days. Silver members also now have access to emergency dispatch services through the Tile SOS button or the Life360 app. (This works with the 2024 Tile devices only, however.)
In addition, Life360 users will soon be able to receive automatic push notifications when their items attached to Tile devices are left behind. The company says to expect this functionality to arrive in the weeks ahead.
Just ahead of this update, Life360 redirected the Tile.com domain to Life360.com.
The company hasn’t yet given an indication if or when it plans to wind down the standalone Tile app, and it likely won’t want to make that move until it’s able to migrate users over to its flagship product. But after Tile functionality is fully replicated in Life360’s app, it may no longer make sense to continue to run both applications. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson said the Tile app is not being retired “at this time.”)
Life360 had said back in 2022 that it would integrate Tile into its main app, noting at the time that if all its Life360 users joined Tile, it would become the largest finding network. But that opportunity may have passed, given the delay in integrating the services. Plus, competitors like Chipolo have since launched their own lost-item trackers that work directly with both Apple and Google’s own built-in finding networks out of the box.
Life360 doesn’t share the number of users for its Tile app, but notes that its flagship product has 83.7 million global monthly active users, 45.3 million of whom are based in the U.S.