Pebblebee’s AirTag alternative now doubles as a panic alarm

Pebblebee has announced a new personal safety feature for its Clip location tracker that’s compatible with both Apple’s Find My and Google’s Find Hub network. Alert is being introduced as a free update to the Pebblebee app today, and the company says it will work with current and future versions of the Clip without requiring a subscription fee. Pressing a button on the tracker will activate a loud siren and flashing light to alert anyone nearby that you’re in trouble, while also triggering the app to send a notification to an emergency contact.

Activating the Alert feature requires you to rapidly press the Clip’s button several times, and it can be canceled by rapidly pressing the button again or using a single long press. When canceled manually, your Safety Circle contact will receive another message letting them know it was deliberately stopped.

Unlike the sounds that the tracker emits when you’re trying to locate it, the 97-decibel siren has a more urgent tone so that it’s immediately obvious to those around you that there’s a problem, and the tracker’s siren and flashing light will continue for up to a minute.

The new feature is comparable to the SOS Alert that was introduced by Pebblebee’s competitor, Tile, last September. Tile’s alert feature comes without the audio and visual alerts but will contact multiple people when activated, even if you’re not a paying subscriber, while having Life360’s team ready to dispatch emergency services to your location requires a Silver, Gold, or Platinum subscription that starts at $7.99 a month

Through the Pebblebee app, you can set up a “Safety Circle” consisting of one trusted contact, who will receive an SMS message when the Alert feature has been activated. The emergency message includes a secure link to the location where the alert was triggered, which can be viewed in a browser so that your contacts don’t need to have the Pebblebee app installed. The company says it plans to expand the Safety Circle to multiple contacts “in the near future,” with continuous live location tracking being a feature on its “product roadmap.”

To ensure you know how to use Alert ahead of time so you can reliably activate the feature during a real emergency, the Pebblebee app includes a test mode that allows you to practice rapidly pressing the button without alerting your Safety Circle contact.

Update, July 14th: Clarified the details of Life360’s SOS Alert feature.