Filed under: TUAW Tips, iPhone
Find My iPhone: Questions, answers, and suggestions
Mobile Me's Find My iPhone is a wonderful (relatively) new feature which can help track down your iPhone if it is lost or stolen, but it is not foolproof, and it must be configured before you need it.
Q: "Is it true that Find My iPhone does not work if you have 3G turned off or lose your iPhone where there is no 3G service available (EDGE only)?"
A: False. Find My iPhone works with the original iPhone, which did not even have 3G or GPS capabilities, so it does work with EDGE. If you have a 3G-capable iPhone and disable the 3G (Settings > General > Enable 3G > OFF) to save battery life, "Find My iPhone" will continue to work.
Q: "Will find my iPhone work over WiFi?"
A: True... sort of... Maybe... Not really. In my home I have very little or no AT&T service (or Sprint, or Verizon, or any other cell provider). I do have WiFi all over the house, and Find My iPhone has never failed to help me locate my iPhone when it is "lost" in my house. In order to test it purely over Wi-Fi, I put the iPhone into Airplane Mode (meaning that both EDGE and 3G were both disabled) and enabled Wi-Fi. I asked "Find My iPhone" to locate my iPhone and was told that it was near Orlando, Florida. It was, in fact, in Ohio. I repeated the test and it came back with the same information. Later, I tried the "Wi-Fi only" test from my home, and Find My iPhone could not find my location at all.
However, even in Airplane + Wi-Fi mode I was able to use the "Display a Message" and "Remote Passcode Lock" features. So you may not be able to locate it on a map, but you still may be able to connect to it.
Proper setup is your first crucial step
All of this is a moot point if you don't have three crucial settings enabled on your iPhone. Without any one of these, Find My iPhone will not work.
- Settings > General > Location Services has to be on (this one is obvious, right?)
- Under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > (Your Mobile Me account), you must set "Find My iPhone" to ON. This is not enabled by default.
- Under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, you must either enable Push OR have fetch set to Every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or Hourly. If you disable Push and set Fetch to "Manually" Find My iPhone will not work.
The good news is that once you have Find My iPhone enabled, if you go to change any setting which will disable Find My iPhone, you will be presented with a warning/confirmation alert and asked if you really want to make that change. When you first set it all up, I encourage you to log into Find My iPhone and test it to make sure that it is working. Don't wait until you need it to test whether or not it is configured properly.
A few more suggestions to maximize your chances to recover your iPhone
Once you have all that setup, will "Find My iPhone" work? My answer is "Yes. Usually."
A story: This summer I accidentally left my iPhone in a restaurant in Framingham, Massachusetts (an area covered by AT&T's 3G service area). Fortunately I knew that it was locked (Settings > General > Passcode Lock > ON with "Require Passcode" set to "Immediately) but when I logged into www.me.com and tried to locate my iPhone, it came up as "Unavailable." I called the restaurant where I had been for lunch. The manager told me that it had been found and they had placed it in their safe. She also told me that when they find a lost cell phone, they normally try to contact the person who lost it using the address book in the phone (looking for a number for a spouse, or "mom" etc), but could not do that for me because the phone was locked, requring a 4-digit PIN.
Despite this anecdote, I strongly suggest that you always use the passcode lock, and set it to lock immediately. Practice entering your PIN so you can do it with one hand, even without looking. If it is always locked and you do lose it, you'll know that it will be difficult for the average person to use it. Hopefully that will increase the chances that they will turn it in wherever they find it. Don't depend on Find My iPhone's ability to remotely lock or wipe your iPhone! Even in a 3G coverage area, you may not always be able to connect to your iPhone. Not to mention that by the time you get to a computer, it may have been found -- and Find My iPhone may have already been disabled if you didn't have Passcode Lock enabled.Remember the restraurant manager's comment about how she tried to return my iPhone but couldn't access any of the information to track me down? What if I hadn't remembered where I left it? Turns out there is something else you can do to help a Good Samaritan who wants to get your iPhone back to you. I realized what I needed was to provide emergency contact information which will appear even when the iPhone is locked. You may also have heard about the ICE (In Case of Emergency) movement, suggesting that cell phone users put a contact named "ICE" in their address books for paramedics, hospital personnel, police, etc to be able to contact someone if you are in an accident or other traumatic event. Again, this won't work if you lock your iPhone.
Turns out there is a rather easy, low-tech solution. As you can see on the image above, I went to the built-in Notes app on the iPhone, put in "If found" and "In case of emergency" contact information. (I put a few blank lines at the top.) Then I simultaneously pressed the Home button and the button on top of the iPhone to take a screenshot of that information. Next, I switched over to the iPhone "Photos" app, found the screenshot, tapped it, set it as my wallpaper, then followed the guides to move & resize it. Voilà! (Dear Comic Sans Marker Felt haters: you can do this same thing with any application on the iPhone which allows you to enter enough visible text.)
As an aside:
Dear Apple: Many of us have handed down our original iPhones to our significant others. Many more have friends who have iPhones. You know what would make a great app? Find My iPhone! Let me enter my Mobile Me username and password into the app and send a message with sound while away from home. It might make the difference between finding it in the club, cab, restaurant, etc before we leave, and having to hunt for it afterward. (Also, as several people suggested in the comments, it would be good if Find My iPhone settings could be password protected even on an iPhone which does not have a passcode lock.)
Lastly, remember that if you aren't eligible for an upgrade, a new iPhone will cost around $600. Mobile Me is $100/year, and gives you a lot more than just Find My iPhone. I have been a big critic of Mobile Me in the past, but for the past several months its syncing has worked much better for me. If you do lose your iPhone and someone helps you get it back? Be sure to give them a reward of some kind. Remember, they just saved you $600.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
oz_paulb said 11:17AM on 10-21-2009
Go to "www.skyhookwireless.com" from your home Wifi, and 'register' its location.
After a few days, your WiFi access point's MAC address will be associated with that location, and "Find my iPhone" over Wifi should have the correct location.
Reply
Gazoobee said 11:25AM on 10-21-2009
Interesting stuff. I have had zero luck with any of the location features and particularly with "find my iPhone" when I'm at home and using Wi-Fi. I've always found this silly in that this is the spot with the *best* communication, but all the phone can do is tell me I'm within a few blocks of my house. The ability to locate your router on the map, (to tell the system specifically that if I am using that router I am within 30 feet of coordinates X and Y), is something that should have been part of the system from the start.
All that being said, I also don't understand why anyone even cares about "Find my iPhone" given that it is almost completely useless for the average individual user.
It works great, but to "find" your phone you have to already have it in your hand, something that you already know of course. Further, you cannot explicitly *share* your phone location information with *anyone* yet every fart app can ask and receive that information? Brilliant! (not).
It only has two uses.
1) in that very very very rare case that the phone is stolen and the thief is an idiot and several other factors all are present, you may be able to find out where it is. Worth the million dollar servers? not really.
2) if you have more than one iPhone on your account. Basically you can track your kids because you are paying for their phones.
And that's it.
I like MobileMe and will never quit it, but "Find my iPhone" has to be the most over-rated *useless* implementations of location aware technology I've ever seen. If my significant other allows me to track them on a map (a la "Latitude"), why shouldn't there be a way to do that? If I know other MobileMe members, why shouldn't I be able to find their iphones and they find mine if I want them to? Why can't I turn this on and off at will?
Sorry to ramble, but I always found the fact that they spend millions of dollars of development on this feature to be stupid considering it's extremely limited utility. Most users will never use this beyond sending themselves a message to their own iPhone to see it work. It's a classic gee-gaw kind of thing that looks cool but is almost without use.
Reply
Tom said 11:39AM on 10-21-2009
I'm pretty sure, if you once actually lose your iPhone or forget it somewhere, you'll suddenly find this feature VERY convenient! It was very useful for me once, I've been partying with a few friends, we stayed at my location, then at a friend's house, at another friend's house and so forth. Sometimes during the night I realized I didn't have my iPhone anymore and didn't know in which of my friend's houses I left it. So I quickly logged on to me.com, started "Find my iPhone" and I instantly had a fix on one of my friend's houses. Just calling my iPhone would not have helped, because all my friends where with me and not in their houses, so they would not be able to pick up.
totoro said 11:34AM on 10-21-2009
There are two features I would love implemented:
1) A more protected way of keeping it on-like how SIM lock is a separate passcode from your passcode. Or even better, a way to turn it on remotely thru MobileMe.
2) A way to use it on the iPhone-if my wife loses her iPhone, why can't I find it using my iPhone? (like you said, an app!)
Reply
whitakerz said 12:27PM on 10-21-2009
you can use me.com from your iphone.
whitakerz said 12:29PM on 10-21-2009
apparently URLs aren't acceptable
farm3.static.flickr.C O M/2472/3652760684_07b9f7b2ae_o.jpg
totoro said 12:35PM on 10-21-2009
I'll try that, thanks!
TJ Luoma said 6:44PM on 10-21-2009
You can access Find My iPhone on your iPhone, but not with Mobile Safari.
See http://db.tidbits.com/article/10609 for more information.
Bossebo said 11:36AM on 10-21-2009
As soon as I switch off push I can no longer find my iPhone although it is set to fetch data every 15 minutes. Messages I send doesn't show up either
Reply
sharris said 2:07PM on 10-21-2009
Same here...
Harry said 11:48AM on 10-21-2009
Nice article. As for the Find My iPhone in those situations why not just call your phone?
Reply
TJ Luoma said 6:54PM on 10-21-2009
Calling the iPhone works fine if the ringer is on, and if there is someone there to find it. Plus you only have a certain number of rings before it goes to voicemail — IF you have cell phone signal.
Find My iPhone will work over Wi-Fi to send a signal and a sound for 2 minutes which plays even if the ringer switch is "off".
robert.odell said 11:52AM on 10-21-2009
I would like to see a better solution for ICE. This one is not one that I had thought of (thank you, btw), but I don't know that I would use it. I like to have something more interesting as my wallpaper. I think the governing *rules* of how apps can operate make it impossible if not very difficult to develop an ICE app but I could be wrong, and there could already be one. I'll investigate.
Reply
robert.odell said 12:04PM on 10-21-2009
There are a few apps actually, and I stand corrected. http://bit.ly/6QWmA seems like a rather useful one, especially with the wallpaper additions.
Michael Schmitt said 4:57PM on 10-21-2009
If you are using the "find my iPhone" feature set of MobileMe, then don't worry about setting up an ICE screen. Just use the "Send a Message" feature with the contact information to the phone and that'll display itself when the Home button is pushed.
TJ Luoma said 7:00PM on 10-21-2009
Robert - no one is going to be able to run an ICE app if your iPhone is locked. If you are NOT going to lock your iPhone, you can just use an "ICE" contact in your address book. Yeah it's nice to have an "Interesting" wallpaper, but I'd rather have a safety net for getting my iPhone back if lost, or contact information if it's ever needed.
@Michael Schmitt said 4:57PM on 10-21-2009
> If you are using the "find my iPhone" feature set of MobileMe, then don't
> worry about setting up an ICE screen. Just use the "Send a Message"
> feature with the contact information to the phone and that'll display itself
> when the Home button is pushed.
WRONG WRONG WRONG. What happens when you are in a car accident and the EMTs pull out your locked iPhone?
The ICE information is NOT the same as "If found, please contact" information, it is information designed to help emergency responders contact family members and/or loved ones.
robert.odell said 1:32AM on 10-22-2009
TJ and Mike - You're both wrong, Mike is wrong for the above mentioned reasons; TJ, you are wrong simply for not investigating which I can't hold against you entirely. The app I linked too does provide at least essential contact info while still allowing for personal wallpaper use (instead of the notepad screencap approach). And with further sleuthing, I was able to find that developer also suggests a ICE card that provides a specific "iPhone passcode" field.
I was simply curious about the ICE capabilities and was able to answer of my curiosities with some app store searching. I do a lot of biking and have ICE solutions, some good, some bad, but having the capability with my iPhone is excellent.
Jose said 11:51AM on 10-21-2009
A couple of weeks ago, I was jumped and robbed while waiting on the bus (as the bus pulled up too, but thats a separate story). The only thing stolen was my iPhone 3gs (a 32GB at that.)
As soon as the police arrived (managed to call them from a bystanders phone) I told them that I can track my phone using MobileMe. They told me to go home and track it overnight.
By the time I got home however, the phone was "unavailable." I'm guessing the thieves turned it on because of the simple fact that they couldnt do anything with it (it was locked w/ passcode.) However, by next morning, I also realized that the iPhone will send its location to MobileMe the next time it's turned on if it had been asked for a location.
Eventually however, they turned the phone back on. I knew they had to, because if they wanted to get to do anything to it (even restore it) the phone needs to be on. And as soon as I managed to find it on mobileme, I called the police and they went and got it for me.
Find My iPhone has become the one "must-have" feature of MobileMe, that makes the $100/year completely worth it.
Reply
Shirli said 11:58AM on 10-21-2009
I would feel a lot more comfortable if I could lock down my settings by requiring a password to change.
Reply
Curly Eric said 12:01PM on 10-21-2009
I think apple made a big mistake allowing the "Find my iPhone" setting to be changed without a passcode confirmation. The fact that it only takes about 5 seconds to subvert the system is insanity when they could have corrected the problem by requiring the passcode for changes to any setting.
Reply