A podcast I listen to has just started advertising Trackr. Their promo code gives you 40% off.

Promo code: fighter

Enjoy!

I bought some cheap aliexpress bluetooth LE trackers, and they are useless. Have to connect to the phone or they sit there flashing a light, when connected they start beeping when out of range. Battery life in the flashing light situation is only a day or so. No way to have it sitting idle waiting on you discovering it on a phone. As it needs to be connected ahead of time, you can only do it from a single phone. The useless app has no account or anything to share your trackers between devices, or allow friends to track them etc. As usual for the cheap chinese option, its well done hardware for a great price let down by the worst possible app for it to be used by.

They also dont have any cloud service for others to search for your things etc. I was hoping for something like this or the tile, or one of many others that do the same thing, with accounts and apps and a cloud platform to make it work.

My biggest issue is that there is so much fragmentation in the market, and you are only having your devices found by people with the same app installed on their phone. So going for anyone but the market leader for it is foolish as you are limiting how many devices are able to find your stolen "whatever" it is stashed inside. It would be quite good if there were public areas with BT LE radios in them that fed all the discoverys back the the platforms for the trackers as well IMO.

I have a few Tile trackers here. Only about 200 users around Wellington according to the app. How comes this one, which seemingly came after shows lots on their coverage map? Or is the map not live?

Nah, will stick with the Tile.

ok. now I understand how they work

I was being an idiot  (ashamed to mention what i thought they did)