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by davidlstanton 2380 days ago
We are targeting Android end of Q1 next year.

To some extent I'd agree with you and eventually I'd love for this to become a consumer product. Here are some of the reasons we haven't taken that approach though.

- We have relatively limited resource. We would have to be choosing between features targeted at consumers and features targeted at factories tracking 1000's of tools.

- We currently can track things to within about 10m. That's about the size of a house. In a factory 400m by 350m on the other hand it's a massive help - people actually spend hours looking for things. Products like Tile solve that problem with a buzzer - our form factor and price point make that very difficult. Sounds also don't work in a noisy factory environment - you usually can't hear the phone in your pocket.

2 comments

I would absolutely love using this to track the shared tools at my place of work - we have had constant problems with people using them and forgetting they had them in their possession. I was about to order a 10-pack to try out until I noticed Android support is not here yet - nearly our entire team uses Android, I can only think of one person (of about 25) who has an iPhone. This is true for most people in my field that I'm aware of - iPhones are relatively rare for whatever reason.

We have job sites within a few hundred mile radius and around ten trucks - just seeing the last known location of the tags would be a massive help determining who has the tool. It's far better than our current group text "Who has X?" method.

And yes, we've tried a sign in/out logbook for the tools but it never caught on. I like that apparently as long as you have the app for Got-it installed the tools should be tracked.

Milwaukee has a very similar product (their TICK trackers) that use Bluetooth, but are in a ruggedized plastic enclosure that's great for tracking larger items but falls short on smaller tools. It also doesn't help that their app is incredibly fickle and can be difficult to use.

Once the Android app comes out, I can see us easily ordering 100 labels to track all our (expensive, small, easily misplace-able) tools.

Hey, happy for you to ping me at david@got-it.com and we'll be in touch end of q1 next year when Android is released.
I wonder if some sort of E-ink approach would work