Star’s Tracker

TL;DR

Star’s GPS activity tracker is from Tractive. Primarily chosen for its activity and sleep monitoring capabilities, it combines a sleek hardware design with a pleasant app interface. It provides breed-tailored activity guidance and comes equipped with best-in-class location tracking without compromising battery life. It’s also waterproof.

Why Tractive?

Tractive’s GPS activity tracker is simply the best-looking GPS activity tracker available in the UK. The hardware is unobtrusive and sleek, and the app has a clean and fresh interface that’s very user-friendly.

Star’s tracker is primarily for monitoring her activity and sleep. Utilising Star’s data, like her breed, age, weight, and height, the Tractive app suggests a recommended daily activity goal tailored to Star. During the night, it monitors movement to detect sleep interruptions which helps gauge her sleep quality.

Thanks to insights like comparing Star to her breed average, and badges for streaks and milestones, the app is a highly effective motivator. It helps Star to keep fit, healthy, and more active than the average Siberian Husky.

It’s also a GPS tracker, a nice feature for peace of mind should Star ever get lost. The GPS location history can produce a nice abstract drawing of where Star’s been, and these have appeared in Star’s journal entries. It’s a small addition but very appreciated.

It does all this whilst boasting up to 7 days of battery life. From Star’s experience, her tracker lasts significantly longer than that thanks to a power save mode when in range of Star’s home wifi network.

How it was chosen

The options for GPS and activity trackers for dogs in the UK are limited. Many can only perform one of these functions, not both. The hardware design is often clunky, obtrusive and simply ugly. The companion apps are often distasteful and provide a poor user experience. For a while, Tractive were no exception.

A GPS activity tracker with an attractive hardware design and a great companion didn’t exist for quite some time.

In the US, however, there’s a tracker called Whistle. Whistle’s devices were among the first to offer a gorgeous hardware design with a superb app. It elevated what to expect of a GPS activity tracker, but it remains limited to the US and Canada.

The desire was a GPS activity tracker that embodied the best of what Whistle offered, but that was available where Star lives, in the UK. A device that was minimalist and unobtrusive with best-in-class functionality and accompanied by a modern, user-friendly app. Tractive GPS DOG 4 is the first and only device to meet those expectations.

The Tractive app

In the Journal