6 Ways To Find a Lost iPhone and What To Do If You Can’t Get It Back

Whether it’s health information , emails , credit card numbers, or your entire Backstreet Boys music collection, a phone thief can learn a lot about you, simply by looking at your iPhone. Many of us have come to rely on them for all sorts of things — from managing finances to paying for groceries — so losing your phone is no fun at all.

So if your phone goes missing, you need to look for it and find it as soon as possible. Here’s how you can track it down, starting with the simplest.

Look Behind The Sofa

Sometimes a lost phone has not been stolen. You may simply be sitting on it, it may be stuffed behind the couch, under the couch, behind the couch… you get the picture. So start by running your hand along chairs, along the side of the mattress, behind things, under things.

You may find that you just dropped it without realizing. Panic over!

Call It

If you have been searching around your home, and you still haven’t found your phone, then do the next simplest thing – phone it. After all, that is what phones are for, right? Give the phone a ring and listen out for that Teletubbies ringtone. Again, easy-peasy.

Use “Find My iPhone”

OK, if you have progressed to this stage, then either a) the phone is genuinely lost or stolen or b) the ringer on the phone has been switched off. Time to try something else, but first chill out and take a deep breath.

The thing is that the following methods have to be activated as soon as you purchase your phone, before any possible theft or loss. They can’t be installed or activated retroactively. If you have lost your phone, and you haven’t activated any of these features, then you may be out of luck. The good news is that Apple enables these features by default, so assuming you haven’t turned them off you should be in luck.

Switching on Find My iPhone is very simple. Head to Settings > iCloud > Find My iPhone. Turn on both options: Find My iPhone and Send Last Location.

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As the screenshot explains, “Send Last Location“ ensures that the last known location of the phone is sent to Apple, when the battery is low. That way, you can still see the phone’s last known location on the map, even if the battery has conked out.

Assuming you have the feature switched on, using it to look for your phone is simple. You can either use another iDevice (such as another iPhone or an iPad) or by going to iCloud.com . If you want to use another iDevice, look for the app called Find My iPhone on the App Store.

When you open it up, after a few spins of the compass, you will see a map of your area (make sure you have allowed the app to know your location).

iCloud will then attempt to locate your phone. If the phone is switched off or out of range, you will see an option to Notify Me When Found. Click that and when the phone is back on and or in range, you will get an email to your Apple ID email address telling you. This means you don’t have to keep watching the iCloud page.

In this case though, my iPhone is on and in range. The map is telling me that the phone is somewhere in my home (or at least it was when the last known location was sent to Apple). So the next thing to do is click Actions at the bottom of the map. This will then give you three options – Play Sound, Lost Mode, and Erase iPhone.

Since the phone is clearly in my house, the best option is to select Play Sound. Even with the sound turned off, this will still work. It overrides the volume option and delivers an ear-splitting sonar-sounding pulse which you will most definitely hear.

On the other hand, if you see from the map that your phone is on the other side of town, another town, or the other side of the world, then it’s time to start using the other two options.

Lost Mode

Lost Mode enables you to lock down your device, mark it as “Lost”, and send a message remotely to the iPhone screen to the person holding it. If you don’t have a PIN code protecting the pho