Life360 Pet Tracker Review: Track your fluffy friends anywhere

Pricing and subscription

Compared to the likes of the £160 PitPat Dog GPS tracker, the £49.99/$49.99 asking price for the GPS-enabled Life360 Pet Tracker seems like an absolute bargain – and it is, until you factor in the subscription.

You see, you’ll need either a Gold or Platinum Life360 subscription to add the tracker to your circle. For reference, that costs £100/$100 per year for Gold, or £167/$167 for Platinum. Each comes with various additional benefits beyond using the tracker, but it’s well worth thinking about before you splash out.

Even then, the first Pet GPS tracker is added ‘free’ of charge, but any additional trackers come with an additional cost of £79/$79 to add them to the app – and yes, that’s on top of the upfront cost. 

It’s a messy system that’ll likely be the biggest hurdle for prospective buyers, even those already with Life360 like myself. 

For reference, the £160 PitPat tracker doesn’t require a monthly subscription – it’s higher, yes, but that’s all you’ll ever need to pay. 

Design

• Rectangular tracker available in different colours
• Should fit most collars
• Quick-release mechanism for charging

The Life360 Pet Tracker is what it says on the tin, and as such, it very much looks like the sea of GPS-enabled pet trackers we’ve seen from companies like PitPat. It’s a discreet rectangular block that clips onto your pet’s collar, with Life360 branding present and accounted for. 

It isn’t the most discreet tracker – measuring in at 51 x 36.6 x 23.9mm and weighing 33.7g, it’s much bulkier than the lesser-capable AirTags that some owners use – but when put onto my German Shepherd Luna’s collar, it didn’t look all that out of place. However, I think it’d be much more noticeable with smaller breeds like Pomeranians and French Bulldogs with their thinner, smaller collars. 

That said, if you want a GPS-enabled tracker rather than one that relies just on Bluetooth like Apple’s aforementioned tracker, that’s the price you pay; all GPS trackers are of a similar size and shape. 

At least Life360 lets you choose from a few colourful options, including pink and navy, along with the more discreet black finish I was provided with for review.

The Life360 logo isn’t just there to rep the brand either; you can turn on a built-in light that emanates from the logo, either by pressing the button on the top of the tracker or via the Life360 app. 

It’s not a dazzlingly bright light, but it’s enough to be able to spot your fluffy friend in an open field, even at night, from around 25-50m away. At the very least, it illuminates the ground just in front of Luna on her dark winter walks and runs, making it easier for me to keep an eye on her as she runs off in the darkness to catch her ball.  

There’s also a built-in siren to help locate your pet when nearby, also activated by the app, but more on the app a little later. 

The tracker slides onto most collars without issue, complete with a handy mounting system that allows you to press two buttons – one on either side of the tracker – to quickly release it for charging, with a USB-C cable found on the inner portion, protected by a weather-resistant cap to achieve its 1m waterproofing rating. 

It makes it much easier to quickly take off and charge without having to take your pet’s collar off completely, and snapping it into place is equally as simple – just make sure you hear both sides click into place, as if only one does, there’s a chance it’ll fall off. And yes, I’m talking from experience here. 

So yes, it may not look all that different to other trackers on the market, but there’s clearly been a lot of effort into squeezing extras like a light and a quick-remove mechanism into its black plastic chassis. 

Features and performance

• GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tracking tech
• Integrates well with the Life360 app, especially Escaped Pet Mode
• Some bugs need to be ironed out

The Life360 Pet Tracker, rather unsurprisingly, revolves mainly around the Life360 app. 

For those unaware of the app, it’s essentially a third-party alternative to Apple’s Find My network, allowing you to track the location of friends and family in your circle – and with a Gold or Platinum subscription that’s required for the tracker, you’ll also get extras like in-depth weekly driving reports, unlimited places and even various insurance for everyone in the circle. 

Even without a paid subscription, you can still track your family and friends in real time, and it plays nicely with Tile trackers too – again, unsurprising considering the former owns the latter. 

The Life360 Pet Tracker, once added to your Circle, acts in a similar way to anyone else in your circle. They get their own tag, with a photo you can add, displayed on the map in real-time. 

Tapping on the icon brings you to a more in-depth menu where you can not only trigger the light, or siren and see where they’ve been recently, but also a button to alert nearby Life360 users when your pet goes missing. 

It’s called Escaped Pet Mode, and the idea is to rally local Life360 users, of which there are 88 million worldwide, to help find your missing pet. I didn’t activate that during my time with the tracker, as I’d hate to potentially get kind-hearted people out on the streets for a false alert, but it’s a fantastic way to leverage Life360’s massive network that helps it shine among the tracker competition. 

Of course, the tracker mainly uses GPS to update your pet’s location in real-time – something that happens every 10-12 seconds when away from home or any other saved locations on your account. It works about as well as you’d expect, and in some cases, it’s actually more responsive than phones connected to the Life360 app. My other half gets a notification about the dog returning home for a walk before she gets notified that I’m home too. 

You’ve also got the option of setting up geofences in the Life360 app, with alerts to let you know if your pet has gone beyond the set boundaries. It’s not a necessity for me in my terraced house and fully fenced garden, but if you live somewhere a little more open, or a home that backs onto fields or forests, it’s great for peace of mind. 

When at one of your saved locations, such as home, the tracker switches to what Life360 calls progressive beaconing technology, essentially a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, to help keep the location up-to-date without unnecessarily draining battery with power-hungry GPS positioning. 

It’s what allows the tracker to last up to a respectable two weeks on a charge, with up to six months of charge on the more limited reserve mode. Charging is simple, requiring only a USB-C cable, and it can go from flat to full in around an hour in my experience. 

Overall, I’ve been pretty happy with the experience on offer from the Life360 tracker. It integrates well into my existing circle on Life360, provides accurate tracking and all sorts of notification options – and the Escaped Pet Mode functionality remains one of the key USPs of the tracker.

That said, I have run into a recent hiccup that neither Life360 nor I could figure out. I recently went for a weekend away, and my lovely Luna went to stay with my mum for the weekend. While at her house, I’d routinely get notifications to say that Luna had left my mums house and arrived at my home, which, upon calling my mum to check, wasn’t the case. 

Checking the location history, you could see a direct line between my house and my mum’s house, 22 miles away, suggesting a glitch in location tracking. 

It seems to tie into the low-power Bluetooth/Wi-Fi connectivity used at saved locations, as it never happened when Luna left my mum’s house and GPS kicked in, but it’s not something I could fix. Hopefully Life360 can get to the bottom of that sooner rather than later.

Should you buy it?