When a suitcase becomes a connected product
Notes from shipping my first physical product, and what a Bluetooth tracker taught me about customer experience.
I joined Mokobara to work around great products. I did not expect to help make one.
Moko Tracker is a 1.7 mm tracker that works with both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub. It went live in April 2026, about a year after Google named Mokobara — alongside July — as one of the first luggage brands with built-in finding in the Find Hub launch.
The interesting part is not the hardware
A tracker has no GPS and no SIM. It shouts an anonymous identifier over Bluetooth, and every passing phone that hears it quietly reports an encrypted location that only the owner can read. The product is really the network, and the network belongs to Apple and Google.
What a brand controls is the moment: the airport belt, the bag that did not arrive, the link you generate in Find Hub and hand to the airline. That is a customer-experience problem in a physical box.
Two ecosystems, one device
Building for both networks was the constraint that shaped everything. It is also the honest answer to the question every customer asks first: will it work with my phone?
What it taught me
Physical products have a release cadence measured in seasons, not sprints. You get one build. The habits from software — ship a v1, measure, iterate — have to move upstream into design, testing and the launch page. Which is where I spent most of my time.