End of 2025. Closing the annual cadence of the pet-IoT field guide.
Scoring the 2024 forecast
| Prediction | Confidence | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY ESP32 pet hardware mainstream | 80% | DIY communities grew; my own feeder + others published builds | ✓ |
| Senior pet mode UX | 35% | Nothing meaningful | ✗ |
| Mars consolidates another player | 80% | Inverted — Mars divested Whistle to Tractive in July | ✗ (direction wrong, high confidence) |
| Local-first pet camera mainstream awareness | 50% | Frigate + Reolink replacing Furbo conversations | ✓ (partial) |
| AI behavior detection stays mostly marketing | 90% | Yes — no breakthrough in 2025 | ✓ |
| Credible non-Mars vitals tracker | 35% | Yes — Tractive shipped resting heart-rate + respiratory-rate monitoring in May, free to existing trackers. The first real consumer vitals, from an independent | ✓ (my 35% was too low) |
| Matter-compatible smart litter or feeder | 45% | Aqara Matter-feeder rumored, not yet shipping | ✗ |
| Long-arc retrospective | 100% | Yes, August | ✓ |
Four hits, one partial, three misses — ~56%, my worst forecasting year, and the most instructive of the twelve. The box-score barely captures why, because the two things I got most wrong were wrong in opposite directions and they're the same story.
I held "Mars consolidates another player" at 80% confidence and it was flatly, directionally wrong: in July, Mars divested Whistle to Tractive. Seven years of watching the empire only ever buy made the one year it sold impossible for me to see coming. That's the classic failure — the high-confidence call resting on "the trend continues" is exactly the one that blows up.
And the prediction I'd lowballed at 35% — a credible non-Mars vitals tracker — actually hit, and I still almost missed it, because I'd spent a decade certain real vitals were perpetually "next year." In May, Tractive rolled resting heart-rate and respiratory-rate monitoring out to its existing trackers, free — derived from motion against a personalized baseline, the first time a mainstream consumer collar measured an actual vital sign instead of inferring behavior. No Whistle, no Fi, no Mars money ever managed it. The scrappy Austrian independent did.
Put the two together and the irony writes itself: the same company that shipped the vitals feature a decade of giants couldn't is the company that bought Whistle two months later. Mars spent nine years owning the device leg and never produced real vitals; the moment it gave up and sold, the buyer had already delivered them. I was wrong about the shape of the arc, and wrong about who'd close the gap — and the answer to both turned out to be the same small name.
What got added this year
- DIY ESP32 pet feeder for Boson (March).
- Second Pebblebee Clip for Boson's collar (May).
- The long-arc retrospective post (August) — written two weeks after Mars's Whistle divestiture, with the empire-trajectory section revised to acknowledge it.
- Tractive DOG 6 + Base Station (September) — evaluating against Fi for Quark. The DOG 6 is the first collar in the house to report a real resting heart rate and respiratory rate, not just behavior.
- The May vitals update on the cats' GPS Cat Minis — Joule and Boson have worn Tractive's cellular cat tracker since late 2022, and in May the heart-rate/respiratory-rate feature simply appeared on the trackers I already owned, free. A decade waiting for consumer vitals, and they arrived as a software update to hardware that was already on my cats.
- A small DIY ESP32 cat-water-fountain monitor (September) — knows when the water filter needs replacing.
What worked
- Tractive's vitals, finally. After a decade of "health" collars that only ever counted movements, a resting heart rate and respiratory rate showed up against a real per-pet baseline. It's still motion-derived, not a chest electrode — but it's a genuine vital sign, baselined and trended, and it's the first time the category delivered the thing I'd been predicting and being wrong about since the first Whistle. That it came from the independent and not the conglomerate is the year's quiet vindication of everything this notebook has argued about who builds good hardware.
- DIY ESP32 reliability. Eight months in, zero failures.
- Find My pet trackers on both cats. Quietly reliable.
- Quark's Fi battery life is still holding at ~12 days; minor degradation from year 1.
What didn't
- Apple's Find My anti-stalking updates in iOS 18 made Pebblebee Clip more aggressive about bystander alerts. Some friends with iPhones report seeing "unknown tracker nearby" alerts when our cats are outside. Slight UX regression.
- Tractive Base Station's architectural laziness. nRF52840 silicon used as plain BLE advertising — no LE Coded PHY, no Thread, no Matter, no Find My relay. Teardown writeup. 2013 architecture on 2025 components.
- The Whistle data-export window. Six weeks from announcement to dark date; mid-August Mars disabled CSV export. Anyone who didn't extract by August 15 lost their pet's historical data.
Forecast for 2026
| # | Prediction | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | We add another dog (Atom-replacement-process eventually) | 65% |
| 2 | Tractive (DOG 6 + Base Station) beats Fi for Quark's next collar | 55% |
| 3 | Mars divests another portfolio piece (BluePearl, a food brand, or another device) | 35% |
| 4 | A Matter-compatible smart litter or feeder ships | 60% |
| 5 | DIY pet-IoT becomes a stable indie maker category | 75% |
| 6 | Community firmware emerges for Tractive Base Station (nRF52840 is openly tooled) | 30% |
| 7 | Apple ships pet-specific Find My API features at WWDC | 55% |
| 8 | Three pets (Joule + Boson + Quark) stay healthy | 80% (the only forecast that matters) |
What I'm buying in 2026
- Whatever Apple ships for pet-specific Find My (rumored at WWDC 2026).
- Quark's next collar — Fi or Tractive DOG 6, depending on how the Base Station's power-saving zone stretches the DOG 6's roughly two-week battery against Fi's real-world fortnight.
- More Tractive evaluation — GPS Cat Mini on the cats, and the DOG 6 battery-test result that decides Quark's next collar.
- A few more ESP32 modules for the next round of DIY pet-IoT projects — possibly including a community-firmware attempt on the Tractive Base Station.
What's next
The series ends on annual cadence here. Going forward, pet-IoT posts will be event-driven — when something interesting ships, when a new pet joins, when something fails publicly.
Forty posts across twelve years (plus this one). Documented arc. The longest single project I've maintained on the blog after the Smart Home IoT series.
Three pets, currently healthy. The data carries forward.
Onto whatever comes next.