Trova Go

Trova Go Review

Trova Go - Trova Go
Good (3.0)

Bottom Line

The Trova Go is a slim, stylish, and pricey little lockbox you can control with your phone.
US Street Price$249.00
  • Pros

    • Biometric authentication is reliable and consistent.
    • Secure design.
    • Small enough to fit in a bag or jacket pocket.
  • Cons

    • Expensive.
    • Location feature is limited and buggy.

Trust can be hard to come by, and everyone has secrets they want to keep. Trova offers ways to keep those secrets secure and still readily available with lockboxes controlled by your phone's biometric authentication. The Trova Go is the smaller of the two lockboxes the company offers, with a slim, stylish design that's easy to store in your jacket. At $249, though, it's pretty pricey for what's ultimately a metal box you unlock with your phone. But it's much more stylish and portable than the $190 Igloohome Smart Keybox Lock 3.


The Trova Go is an aluminum alloy box available in dark gray, light gray, olive green, or sandstone. It's slightly larger than a glasses case, measuring 1.0 by 6.0 by 2.9 inches (HWD) and weighing 9.8 ounces empty. The top and bottom panels have a slight taper, giving the box a gentle hexagonal cross section. This means it can wobble slightly if you set it on a flat surface, but it won't go anywhere.

The right panel holds a power button with an indicator light ring around it, and a pinhole reset button that reboots the device but doesn't wipe its security code. The left panel holds a USB-C port for charging the battery, which according to Trova can last up to 73 days.

The interior compartment of the Trova Go measures 0.8 by 5.2 by 2.2 inches. It's lined in light gray plastic and rubber, with an elastic band across the top of the lid for holding folded documents and cards securely, and a smaller leather strap with a magnet to secure it against the larger strap for holding rings. Trova says the internal compartment is built to conceal odors, with the silicone top pressing securely against the plastic lower half when closed.

Trova Go

The compartment is fairly puny, too small to hold anything like legal documents, passports, or wads of cash. However, it's an ideal size for holding memory cards with sensitive information, ID cards, keys, jewelry items, or anything else small you'd like to stash.


The Trova app pairs with the Trova Go (for Android and iOS) for locking and tracking. After you create a free account in the app and pair the Trova Go, you can unlock the box simply by tapping its lock icon in the middle of the screen, then using your phone's authentication system of choice. The app automatically brings up the same method with which you unlock your phone, whether it's a PIN code, fingerprint, or facial recognition.

You can pair multiple Trova Go boxes to your phone with the app. However, you can't set up multiple users to be able to open the box. The much larger Trova Home ($699) supports multiple users, but each Trova Go can only be unlocked by its singular owner.

Besides unlocking the Trova Go, the app enables a few other useful features. It provides a notification if you leave the box open for too long (your choice of 5, 10, or 15 minutes, or not sending a notification at all). It can also let you know if the box is disconnected or has a low battery.

The app also has a location tracking feature. The Trova Go doesn't have any built-in GPS technology, but the app keeps track of your phone's GPS location whenever you connect to the box, showing you a Google Maps view of the last place you had it. Unfortunately, if it gets stolen, you're out of luck.

Trova Go

Also unfortunately, I could only get the GPS feature to work on my iPad Mini. Whenever I tapped Locate in the app on my Pixel 3a XL, the app crashed and closed.

Small and Sturdy

As a lockbox, the Trova Go appears to be as secure as any portable container can be. It only unlocks through the Trova app with your phone's authentication system. In my case it was my fingerprint on my Google Pixel 3a XL, which unlatched the box each time I tapped the screen and scanned my finger. It's conceivable that a very strong, very thin shim can pop the box open, but considering the silicone interior along the top presses flush against the lower compartment, that seems unrealistic.

You can of course try to smash it open like any small metal box with a lid and a hinge, but we didn't test this. Regardless, there's no quick and quiet way to pop the box open without your phone and chosen unlocking method, which makes it reasonably secure.

Pricey Privacy

The Trova Go does exactly what it sets out to do: provide a secure, private container for your sensitive materials. It's stylish and about as secure as a portable, pocketable lockbox can be, and it's as easy to unlock as your phone. Its compartment is very small, though, so it's really only useful for tiny items—it's not for storing paperwork or any valuables you can't reasonably fit in a wallet. With that in mind, the Trova Go's $250 price seems rather high, though comparable smart lockboxes, like the aforementioned Igloohome Smart Keybox Lock 3, aren't much less expensive.

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Further Reading

About Will Greenwald