Have you ever lost your iPhone between your couch or under your clothes somewhere. And you can’t find it when you are in a hurry? Or have you left your iPhone to a restaurant or in your friend’s car? We have some cool tricks and tips to help you.
1. “Find my iPhone” app
Note: this only works if you have “Find my iphone” enabled on your ios device (iPhone, iPad, iPod, macbook). How to find out is “Find my iPhone” enabled on your iPhone or not, follow these steps:
- Launch “Settings” app on your device
- Look for “iCloud” and open it
- Look for “Find my iPhone”
- You can see if it is “On or Off”
- If Off then I suggest you enable it.
Anyway to the point, you can use several methods to find your iPhone with the help of “Find my iPhone”
Use someone else’s iPhone to search for your own:
You can use your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend or even a friend’s iPhone to track down your own iPhone.
- Open “Find my iPhone” app on someone’s iPhone
- Log in to icloud with the email associated with your iPhone
- You can see that it will try to automatically locate your device
- If your iPhone is turned on it will show you the active location
- If your iPhone is turned off it will show you the last location
Use web browser to find your iPhone:
You can easily log in online to track down your iPhone via www.icloud.com. You can do that on all devices which can access internet like: tablets, iPads, PC, Mac etc.
- Open web browser and navigate to www.icloud.com
- Log in to icloud with the email associated with your iPhone
- Select “Find my iPhone”
- You can see that your phone is being located
- If your iPhone is turned on it will show you the active location
- If your iPhone is turned off it will show you the last location
How to protect your stolen phone via “Find my iPhone”
You can use this method with both versions mentioned above. How to protect your device and data from being stolen or copied when you have lost your device:
- When you have located your device or seen the last location
- There are 3 options you can choose from
- Play sound – very helpful when you have lost your phone someone near you
- Lost mode – This will block the usage of your iPhone, can be accessible only by your icloud password.
- Erase iPhone – erases all data from the device, so any of your photos, documents, notes will reach wrong hands.
2. Google location history
Note: this will only work if the location history is turned on with your google account. And also you have google account associated with your device.
Google location history don’t show live location, it just shows the places you have been recently and updates itself when the phone comes online. But in many cases the last location has been the key of finding your iPhone.
3. Dropbox
As I have mentioned it in my previous post you might be lucky to find your iPhone thief thanks to dropbox.
What you need is: dropbox installed on your device, camera upload turned on (meaning that every photo that is taken with your iPhone will be automatically uploaded) and ofcourse you need your thief to be a little bit of stupid to just keep using your device without removing your accounts.
But there has been reports these things happening, that the new owner of your device will take photos and you recognize the places and also id they make selfies you can identfy them and report to police. With that way you can easily find them.
Can I locate my device via IMEI code?
Well in theory NO. The imei number just identifies your device in Apple’s databases. And basically is like your national identification number. But If you are lucky and also influencial person i’m pretty sure police can help you. Apple has somewhat working together with police so they can track your iPhone via IMEI, using the first method “Find my iphone” explained above, but as the rumours goes, they have a little more power over that.
My recommendation is that turn your “Find my iPhone” ON and as soon as your iPhone get’s stolen report it to the police and of course use the Find my iPhone features yourself to track down your expensive iPhone yourself.