I have been a pretty hardcore user of Tile Trackers for 7 years. At this point, I even have one in my travel kit, to attach to rental car keys. All in all, they have worked pretty well. But finding things via crowd-sourced location (leveraging all the Tile users out there as an ad-hoc mesh) has been pretty hit-or-miss, the few times I have used it. Whereas the Apple Air tags have the opposite problem--they are very good at "phoning home" to report location, and that is causing a major privacy problem.
So when I thought to use a bluetooth tracker to monitor my luggage, the Apple Air Tag was the no-brainer choice, even if it is twice as expensive. The fact that its network includes not just other Air Tags, but also iPhones, gives it an overwhelming network scale advantage.
Which got me thinking--Google should buy Tile (or, should have bought). Overnight, it could match Apple's network coverage.
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