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, ensuring that random bumps won’t trigger it accidentally. 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.

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.”

The tracker’s siren and flashing light will continue for up to a minute, but should it be triggered accidentally, or if the problem resolves itself quickly, the alert 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.

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

The new feature is comparable to the SOS Alert that was introduced by Pebblebee’s competitor, Tile, last September. However, while Tile’s SOS Alert can contact multiple people and even let you have Life360’s emergency dispatch center call an ambulance, it requires a subscription that starts at $7.99 a month — and doesn’t include the audio and visual alerts.