The main pro to this device is the incredibly low monthly fee, especially if you need coverage in other countries. I live close to the border and have relatives in Canada, so I wanted something that would work there as well as the USA. The tracking is quite accurate, and I suspect this will be true for anyone who lives in an area with decent T-mobile/AT&T coverage. The monthly fee is only 1/3rd the cost of the next cheapest competitor.
However, there are many quirks about the device and app that means it won’t work for quite a few people. If you get an older version of the tracker (mid 2022), the on/off button design is poor, very hard to turn on and off and the button falls out sometimes – the newer version (mid 2023) seems fine however. Secondly, the app is incredibly bare bones, and doesn’t have basic features like being able to filter the location history by time of day (something that as a developer myself, I believe should be an incredibly simple feature to implement, having done so myself in several projects)… I have suggested this feature, but alas no updates. The battery life on this device started out good, but after owning it for about 5 months, I now only get a few days of battery life at best. The app does conflict with itself in regards to battery life too, I will get an alert saying the device is below 20%, but then when I tap on the device details, it’ll say it’s at ~50% or so quite often….hm. I also had a heck of a time getting this to work when we did cross the border into Canada – I had to turn the device on and off multiple times, try to trigger a manual update, clear my app data, etc…and even then, it took nearly 24 hours before the signal finally triggered (and this was in metro Vancouver, an area with great coverage).
The deal-breaker for many however, is that you cannot change the update frequency on-the-fly if your pet gets loose. For example, if your update frequency is 10 minutes (default setting), and you want to change it to 2 minutes (the most-frequent available setting)… you’d have to wait 10 minutes for that change to go through. If you had it set to 2 hours…you’d have to wait 2 whole hours for the change to go through. For flight-risk, fast-running pets, that 10 minutes to 2 hours of lost time could be pretty significant. They say this is to preserve battery life, which does make sense, but after owning the device for months, the battery life isn’t great anyway, and currently has degraded to the point that it’s actually worse than some competitors.
This device currently works okay for me (other than the now abysmal battery life) because I got this for my fairly-slow velcro senior dog who wouldn’t ever try to get away on purpose…he’s just easily distracted by things. If you have a flight-risk pet, something like Tractive, where you can update the frequency immediately if your pet gets loose, may be a better option.
If my battery life degrades any further, I will be contacting support to see if they will honor the 1 year warranty, and update this review accordingly… to be determined. The battery life also seems to be significantly worse in colder weather (barely below freezing, so not even that cold, though).
UPDATE: Unrelated to battery-life, my device started acting spotty, sometimes not detecting movement. I noticed this around the 9-month mark, but it could have been earlier… I had stopped using the device for a while since my dog died, so I only noticed the behavior when we adopted another dog a few months later. Contacted the company and they sent me a new device without any hassle, and a new case as well! The new device has a re-designed on/off button, which is much better than before. Added additional star for great customer service and improved device design.
Genie - Research Bot
![Tack GPS [Lowest Monthly fee| 30 Days Battery Life| FCC Certified] -Child, Kids, Pet, Dog, Cat, Elderly, Alzheimer, Car, Vehicle, Bike, Personal Tracking Device. GPS +WiFi +Cellular](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/417Iwv14TdL._AC_.jpg "Tack GPS [Lowest Monthly fee| 30 Days Battery Life| FCC Certified] -Child, Kids, Pet, Dog, Cat, Elderly, Alzheimer, Car, Vehicle, Bike, Personal Tracking Device. GPS +WiFi +Cellular")
Report