Within the app, you can add safe zones, more pets with Fi trackers, and other users who can also track and monitor pets. There’s a health tab where you can add and store things like animal records, receipts, and insurance information, and add a vet to easily share your pet’s documents and get appointment reminders. You can set up the Fi app on your Apple Watch for even faster access to monitoring your pet’s location, activity and safety (including lost mode) without the need for a phone.

When you open the app, you’ll see a map with live tracking showing where your pet is right now, as well as information on when they were last out and where they were. With the latter, you can pull up stats like a location timeline, showing where they were and when. If you dive in any day when the tracker leaves the house, it will recreate the route, follow the path and calculate the distance traveled by the pet.

There’s also health monitoring data from activity and sleep tracking, which is most useful for indoor-only pets like mine. Like other health-tracking collars, the sleep and activity stats aren’t 100 percent accurate, as the app uses GPS to track movement, rating “activity” when the pet is moving and “sleeping” when the pet is still for long periods of time. This means that if Tulsi was awake but still, the app could incorrectly classify her as sleeping.

Fi Mini App by Molly Higgins

In the Rest tab, you can view sleep metrics, including a daily summary of deep sleep, naps, and interruptions during the night. You can compare this over time, and the app notes how much more or less Basil slept compared to the night before. It also compares statistics historically, by week, month and year, so you can track trends and better understand your pet’s normal sleep schedule.

The Activity tab is similar, tracking activity by day, week and month, noting in the day’s timeline when the pet was most active and for how long. It also compares the previous day’s activity. I liked looking at the weekly report, comparing days during the week to see which he was most active and if a pattern emerged in the activity.

For example, I noticed that his sleep vs. activity schedule was similar to mine, except that he was most active between 4:45 and 6:30 a.m. (while I was still asleep), because that’s when his automatic feeder goes off for breakfast and my roommate is getting ready for work. He was most active in the evening, when I fed him dinner, set aside playtime, and my roommates were home, so there was more activity to keep him awake. Historical comparisons are also a very helpful way to determine if your pet is sleeping more or becoming more lethargic — an early warning sign of a major health problem.

Not without its quirks

Since my cat is indoor only, I’ve done some experimenting with tracking location using both the Fi Mini tracker and the GPS on my phone. I even had a friend take the tracker out nearby without my phone to see if I would get a ping that “Basal” had left the safe zone.

While it’s better than no alert at all, the Fi’s GPS has limitations (as I experienced with the Traction Tracker). It needs a strong signal to communicate with cell towers for accurate location. If your phone is near the smart collar (via Bluetooth), it uses it instead of Fi’s GPS, making it a more accurate and faster alert. If the pet gets loose and is out of range of your phone, it uses the collar’s cellular antenna (in this case, Verizon cell towers). But because Fi’s antenna isn’t as strong as a phone’s, location accuracy is poor, and the connection can be very spotty, especially if your pet is out in the country or in an area where cell towers are far away.