Tile’s CEO CJ Prober is openly unhappy with Tim Cook’s decision to enter the mobile tracker business. This was revealed in an interview for Bloomberg. Apple’s AirTags have been out for two weeks now (although most aren’t delivered yet), but Tile is already sensing the great threat they’ll be for its business.
What’s the matter
Prober says that Apple has put Tile at a massive disadvantage with the release of the AirTag and recent changes to iOS, including the way it interacts with Tile trackers. Tile’s CEO goes back to 2019, when Apple launched the Find My app, claiming the Cupertino-based company “made a number of changes” which caused difficulties for Tile users that wanted to use the trackers on their iOS devices. He claims that the changes suggested “Tile was broken when it wasn’t.”He isn’t happy that existing Tile devices don’t get access to the Find My network either, and says that this coupled with the “seamless activation… and UWB chip (for precise location) are the only things that set the two trackers apart.
CJ Porter
CJ Prober
What’s next for Tile
CJ Prober is not worried about the company’s long-term future, saying that “the good news is that Tile is very well positioned (with) a super differentiated product cross-platform.”
