2016 pet IoT in review — Whistle goes cellular, Mars buys in, Furbo lands
End of 2016, and it's the year the thing I've wanted since 2013 finally shipped — then got bought the same month. Cellular GPS in the puck, owned by a pet-food company before I'd finished evaluating it. That's the shape of the whole year.
Scoring the 2015 forecast
| Prediction | Confidence | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whistle ships a built-in-cellular tracker | 85% | Whistle GPS Pet Tracker, April | ✓ |
| Whistle acquired by a pet conglomerate | 65% | Mars Petcare, ~$117M, April | ✓ |
| A treat-tossing dog camera ships | 50% | Furbo shipped in August | ✓ |
| SureFlap announces a connected hub | 70% | Announced; ship slipped to 2017 | ✓ (partial) |
| Petnet has a first major outage | 60% | Minor missed-feed glitches, no multi-day event yet | ✗ |
| A credible cat-fitness device | 40% | Nothing serious — the cat side stayed thin | ✗ |
| First HomeKit pet device | 35% | Nothing | ✗ |
| Tagg shuts down or folds into Whistle | 55% | Folded into Whistle's cellular line post-acquisition | ✓ |
Call it 5/8 plus one partial — roughly 65%, a step down from 2015's 75%. The hits were the ones about market structure: cellular convergence and consolidation, which I'd been tracking since the Tagg-versus-Whistle radio argument in 2013. The misses were all timing — Petnet's outage, the cat-fitness device, HomeKit. I keep predicting on a calendar; vendors don't ship on one.
What got added in 2016
- The Whistle GPS Pet Tracker (April, $79 + $6.95–$9.95/mo). Bought one in May for evaluation; shelved it by October after the six-month review — 3–4-day real battery and a subscription that bricks the hardware if you stop paying.
- Furbo (shipped August) — the treat-tossing dog camera out of the spring Indiegogo. Haven't lived with one long enough to write it up; that's a 2017 post once I have real data.
- Petnet SmartFeeder — a full year of use now after the late-2015 ship. Mostly working, the occasional missed feed.
- Nothing for Joule. The cat-IoT gap holds.
What worked
- The 2013 Whistle activity monitor plus FitBark on Atom. Reliable, redundant, no subscription. Still the best pre-cellular combo for a dog that doesn't bolt.
- The SureFlap microchip door for Joule — a year and a half in, still 100% read reliability. The neighbor's gray tabby has given up.
- The Petnet feeder for travel. Schedule, portion control, remote-feed from the app — covered two vacations this year without a sitter for the food.
What didn't
- The cellular tracker's subscription model. The hardware is inert without the monthly fee. I'm not interested in pet gear that turns into a paperweight when I stop paying.
- The Mars-owned recommendations layer. Marketing dressed as care advice, surfacing only Mars-portfolio food brands. Disabled where the app lets me.
- The cat side. Nothing new for cats in 2016 except the announcement of the SureFlap hub. Joule stays under-served.
The cellular tracker's failure mode is worth drawing out, because it's the shape the whole category is settling into:
Forecast for 2017
| # | Prediction | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The SureFlap connected hub finally ships | 90% |
| 2 | I write up Furbo after living with it through the winter | 80% |
| 3 | Whistle ships a smaller second-generation cellular tracker | 65% |
| 4 | Petnet has its first multi-day outage | 55% |
| 5 | Litter-Robot launches a Wi-Fi-connected version | 75% |
| 6 | Mars acquires at least one more pet-tech startup | 65% |
| 7 | First Apple HomeKit pet product | 25% |
| 8 | A genuinely useful cat-side device appears | 35% |
The pattern under all of these: the dog side keeps maturing while the cat side stalls, and every new device arrives carrying a subscription and an owner with a portfolio to sell.
What I'm buying in 2017
- The SureFlap hub when it ships — finally remote-locking Joule's door.
- A Litter-Robot Wi-Fi version if the connected one is real and not a gimmick.
- Holding on the next cellular tracker; the battery and subscription math hasn't changed enough to justify it for a fenced dog.
What's next
The Petnet long-term review in Q1 — a full year-plus on a cloud-dependent feeder, including the parts that make me nervous about trusting feeding to someone else's servers. Then Furbo and the whole smart-camera category, once I've got real footage and a real opinion. Three years of pet IoT documented now: dog side maturing, cat side thin, Mars consolidation accelerating, and the same subscription-and-data-ownership shape every other IoT category has worn.