Tile CEO: ‘We Welcome Competition From Apple, But We Think It Needs to Be Fair’

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4. May 2021

Just after Apple announced its AirTags, Tile CEO CJ Prober relayed his concerns about competing with Apple in the tracking space, and said that Tile would ask Congress to investigate Apple’s business practices specific to Find My and item trackers.

Prober this week did an interview with Bloomberg, where he further expanded on Tile’s complaints about Apple and why he feels that Tile is disadvantaged on Apple’s platform. Prober said that while Tile “welcomes competition,” he doesn’t feel that Apple is being fair.

Tile welcomes competition. We’ve been competing for 8 years with small companies to Fortune 50 companies, so we welcome competition from Apple, but we think it needs to be fair.

Prober claims that when Apple “launched” ‌Find My‌ in 2019, there were changes to iOS that made it harder for Tile to operate. Apple did release a unified ‌Find My‌ app in 2019, but has long had ‌Find My‌ iPhone and ‌Find My‌ Mac apps for devices.

If you look at the history between Tile and Apple, we had a very symbiotic relationship. They sold Tile in their stores, we were highlighted at WWDC 2019, and then they launched ‌Find My‌ in 2019, and right when they launched their ‌Find My‌ app, which is effectively a competitor of Tile, they made a number of changes to their OS that made it very difficult for our customers to enable Tile. And then once they got it enabled, they started showing notifications that basically made it seem like Tile was broken.

Prober is talking about changes that Apple made to location services permissions. For privacy purposes, Apple stopped making it easy for apps to get permanent access to a user’s location. Apps in iOS 13 were not initially allowed to present an “Always Allow” option when requesting location access, and the feature had to

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