Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Tile popularized marking items and tracking them from your phone with its small Bluetooth tags, but is suddenly facing more competition from giants like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung. Now the company that started out of an incubator and crowdfunding campaign has announced it will be acquired by Life360, which calls itself a “leading family safety platform.” The deal is valued at $205 million and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.
Tile has developed its product line over the years with a variety of different trackers, as well as partnerships with other companies to use its technology. However, the game may have changed once Apple and Google started building their own item-locating features into iPhones and Android…