TrackR

» see thetrackr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Two men lost their keys during a surfing trip and built a company about it. Chris Herbert and Christian Smith started working on the thing in 2009 and launched it in 2010 out of Phone Halo, in Santa Barbara. The best known early shape was the Wallet model, a flat plastic rectangle 65 by 40 millimeters that you dropped in beside the cards. It beeped when your phone asked it to, and if you had lost the phone instead, you pressed the button on the fob and the phone rang.

The hardware got smaller and better looking for several years. The Wallet model gave way to the Bravo in early 2015, an anodized aluminum disc 31 millimeters across with a hole for a keyring, and then to the Pixel, smaller still at 26 millimeters. Each one ran a coin cell you replaced roughly once a year and talked Bluetooth 4.0 to anything running Android 4.4 or iOS 8 upward. By August 2017 more than five million of them had been sold.

Apple shipped AirTag in April 2021, using the installed base of iPhones as the finding network, which is the one asset a tracking tag cannot buy with hardware. TrackR stopped being supported four months after that. No statement from either company links the two events, and none is needed to read the sequence.

~ the dossier ~

~ how crowd locate was supposed to work ~

The feature was called Crowd Locate and the idea was genuinely clever. Each tag broadcast to every nearby phone running the TrackR app, whether or not that phone belonged to you, and every one of those phones reported back what it had seen. Your lost keys in a car park two cities away would quietly announce themselves to a stranger walking past, and the stranger's phone would tell you where they were without telling the stranger anything at all.

As an engineer the arithmetic is what sticks with me. A relay network like that is worth roughly the square of how many people carry it, so it stays nearly useless for a long time and then works all at once, and the app had to be installed and actually running on the passing phone for any of it to happen. Five million tags across a planet is a thin grid. Apple's version started from several hundred million handsets that were already carrying the software and already had it switched on.

~ when it became adero ~

On 3 December 2018 TechCrunch reported that TrackR was becoming Adero and moving from finding single objects to tracking whether a group of them was complete, so your bag could tell you the laptop charger was missing before you left the house. Existing TrackR products would keep being supported "for the time being", in the company's own words. Adero did not outlast the product it replaced. Its own domain stopped resolving, and the lander sitting where the sign-up page used to be runs to 114 bytes.

~ the notice it left up ~

The notice the company left behind survives in the Wayback Machine, and it is unusually gracious. Some time between 12 August and 16 September 2021 a paragraph appeared at the top of thetrackr.com: "We regret to inform you that TrackR will no longer be supported on Apple or Android devices after August 15, 2021. We want to thank you for your trust and support throughout the years. We hope TrackR was the perfect resolution for finding your lost items."

That notice sat on the homepage for another nine months, under a footer that still read "© 2019 TrackR" and a line crediting MorningSave and meh.com as partners. The page kept answering until 25 May 2022 and was a 404 by 4 June. Meanwhile the tags themselves went on sitting in drawers and on keyrings, physically fine, pinging nothing.

~ who has the domain ~

thetrackr.com resolves today, with 125 kilobytes of storefront under a different name, selling Bluetooth trackers that work with Apple's Find My network. The operator is unrelated to the original company and makes no claim to be a revival. The address where TrackR posted its apology now sells the thing that replaced it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »