My plan is to open the garage door, right when she gets home 
Worked great.
On my Android phone, not only is Google Maps installed by default, it can’t be uninstalled.
While I can’t speak to exactly what signals the iPhone sends that allow “Find My” to work, the AirTags and other similar items are passive devices. They don’t know where they are, ever. When someone with an iPhone gets near an AirTag, it makes a note of what tag it saw, references that against its own calculated location, then sends that data along to Apple. So they’re effectively outsourced the “find” part.
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't let you do that.Give it another 2 years. But truely, I do worry about my wife when she is alone hiking or riding. It’s sort of my job.
How would it know it’s location if the phone has location turned off? Is it using the ‘finding phone’s’ location? What if the ‘finding phone’ also has location turned off?
Secondly, I believe the OP lives in CO & spouse was on a hike; that could quite possibly mean in an area of no cell phone coverage; how does “Find my” work if it’s in an area that can’t communicate with the cell network? I believe with the newest iphones you can manually force them to push a message out via satellite but will the phone do that on it’s own?
Not so much a hike we have relocated to suburbia. But there are lot’s of trails around. She was walking a dog to a local reservoir.on a trial, and walked around the reservoir. She had cell coverage I’m sure.
It fell out of her coat pocket. She usually keeps it in her purse (really a ‘fanny’ pack) but does not take that with when going on a walk.
For iPhones, you need the tracking (“Find my…”) enabled. I assume the same (only, different) for Android. I vaguely recall something when I was setting it up that it wanted to enable face ID to use that feature, so it’s not enabled on my phone. I have it enabled on my iPads, which don’t use faceID. I would imagine that enabling “Find My” implicitly allows it access to the phone’s location service. I check on my phone, and I see “find my” and “Apple watch find my” are allowed location service access “while using app”. Unclear whether that’s the finder or findee or both. There’s also the ability to tell the phone to ping out loud from your watch, when you say “where’s my phone? Oh… on the kitchen counter.”
As mentioned, they also use bluetooth to tell any nearby Apple devices where they are (or at least “I’m near you!”). So you can get the last location where an Apple device last saw them, up until the phone battery died. Plus presumably if you activate “find my” for a GPS-enabled device that is live on the phone network, it will report its location. (Internet? I’m skeptical, that would require the device to be regularly “phoning home” to Apple from behind a firewall.)
The freakiest thing at the time was when my wife got one of the early Apple watches. She’d left her phone behind in the hotel room, but we went into the Apple store on 5th Avenue in NYC to browse, and she started getting text messages from work. Presumably all the apple store Wifi use the same broadcast name and credentials, so it was online using the store wifi.
I saw a bit where some TV show helped someone track down their missing luggage with Airtags during the post-covid mass lost luggage fiasco, where they determined it was in a particular warehouse - presumably one of the people moving the luggage had an iPhone. A relative also told how they tracked an iPhone that was left behind on a store counter from their dad’s phone. They found it in a dumpster in a nearby housing development, presumably the “finder” could not get it unlocked and gave up.
I remember one lost-luggage story in which the passenger traced their missing luggage to a private home near the airport. In other words, someone was stealing luggage from the airport. I have AirTags in all of my luggage. It helps when I’m waiting at the baggage carousel to see how far it is.
Oh man a few weeks ago I was out in the backyard shoveling a path for the dog to walk after 2’ of snow fell. I got back inside and my iPhone was GONE. I went back out and was shoveling more and could not find it. I didn’t think “Find My…” would be useful because I was at my house and so was my phone. My friends offered to call my phone but that wouldn’t be useful - the damn thing was on silent.
I logged on to iCloud anyway and was pleased that I could successfully log on to access the “Find My” function. Usually when you log in to Apple you have to verify 10 ways to Sunday using your phone. I clicked the “Make my phone make a noise” button not expecting anything - phone on silent, many steps away from my PC, buried under snow. I figured even if it did make a noise I wouldn’t be near it enough to hear it, or it would stop before I got there.
Turns out the noise it makes is loud and long. I actually got distracted by my dog after setting it off, and was standing in my kitchen and heard it. 20’ away on my deck under a foot of snow. It kept going as I shoveled (turns out it’s kind of hard to pinpoint sound) and I finally found it! And so far my phone is no worse for wear.
Anyway…if you lose your phone at home and it’s on silent so calling it won’t help, and you don’t have an Apple Watch to tell you where it is, go to iCloud.com and ask it for help.
I do think you need to enable “Find My” but I’m not sure. I have it enabled so my mom/dogsitter can track me but maybe if you’re trying to find your own phone through your own Apple account, you don’t even need to turn it on first.
I can’t speak much to the iPhone, as I have never owned one, but the “find my android” functionality located my phone underwater (water-resistant Android powered Samsung S21) in a mud puddle along the walk of shame (obviously still very inebriated) between a young lady’s house and my own home.
I used my laptop to locate it, 8 hours later.
I tried using the Find My app on my iPhone to locate one of the AirTags as a test and the Precise Finding feature guided me to the exact location.
The answer is a bit nuanced. I would suggest starting a new topic if you want to discuss it so you don’t hijack this one.
I am looking at the Find My Mobile setting on my Android Samsung phone. It shows my Samsung account, ‘Allow this phone to be found’ , ‘Send last location’, and ‘Offline finding’ settings as an on/off switch for each. Allow this phone to be found and Send Last Location are switched on for me, with GPS switched off. However, when I go to switch on Offline Finding it requires location (GPS) to be enabled. So I guess it depends on what type of tracking you need, and on the type if location you need to find your device, re: GPS.
I’ve a story. About 25 years ago, new to cell phones. My wife lost hers. In our driveway. She/I did not know that she lost it.
We had a lot of snow, so I plowed. That’s when we realized her phone was missing.
At that time we did not leave them on.
It turns out that it was on her lap when she got out of the car. I plowed it into a snowbank (our yard). I deduced where it may be. So I start digging.
Found it.
I lost an airtag, which has got to be near the top of surveillance irony.
It used to be attached to the dog, but one day we noticed it was not. “Last reported location” was in the house, but no amount of going room to room and hitting the “play sound” button worked to find it.
Normally we’d get a message “Echodog’s battery is low,” which we always found funny. Then we’d replace the battery. The battery probably went from medium to dead very fast, when nobody was home to get the message, and then it managed to fall off the dog’s collar.
After looking off and on for a month or so, I bought some airtag like devices that can be set to track in Apple or Android mode, but not both simultaneously because of enshittification. Shortly after that I found the missing airtag in the grass in the backyard. Put a new battery in it, and it came to life.
The root problem is that using old, no-name band, cr2032 batteries bought at a bulk rate for a light up greeting card school project are probably not the best choices for airtags. Get the good ones.
Awwwww. That’s cute.
Our dogs still start their engines at about 3am. We are trying to turn the clock on them to wait untill 5am.
They have a doggie door, so that’s not the problem. They want to eat. We feed them twice a day. But we would prefer 5am, and 5 pm. Well we just want to roll that forward a bit.
Especially if you get the notification while the dog is napping.
My wife went for a bike ride yesterday. I jumped on her computer and did ‘Find My Device’ It followed her perfectly. I opened the garage door right when she got back.
Thanks folks.