There are a handful of smartphone owners only of our generation who can claim to have never lost their phone. The problem is so genuine that we are sure each and everyone of us has once in our lives felt the panic of having lost our phones and asking the same question frantically – have you seen my phone, or some other version of it. It could be anywhere – your house or the local supermarket or the movies – but till you find it, you will have your heart pounding pretty hard, no matter what.
And we can totally understand. Our phones have become our lifelines in last one decade and having the prospect of losing it, or worse having it stolen, is sure going to affect us bad. It is not just the financial investment in our device that is bogging us down in those moments, in fact more of it is about our concern with respect to our privacy and our data’s safety.
That makes it extremely crucial that we find our phone ASAP, and for that, proud Android owners have the option of using the built in phone tracking feature which is in fact kind of like the “Find my iPhone” system in an Apple phone. In case, you had yourself an older phone, you might be needed to set yourself an Android Device Manager up in your Android beforehand, failing which you might not be able to track down your phone. Now if you have lost your phone and you did not have it installed before, you are in a soup.
However, if your phone was new or newer, you would not have to have the Android Device Manager set up before hand in your Android. Though it is mandatory that you have a Google account synced with your phone, which is hugely likely as nowadays you need to log in with your Google account to use your Android device to its full potential and to have it running fully.
Apart from that, all you would need now is to pray and hope your phone is in fact switched on as it would need to have a functioning network so it can send you a wireless signal. We thus only can assume that you are all set to go with the absolutely necessary features mentioned above (Synced in Google Account & Functional Phone) in place, so you would have to follow the following steps to locate your lost Android –
You would need to use another Android or your laptop/PC to basically run the Android Device Manager. You can use either the app or the website itself. You would have to either search for Android Device Manager or use your browser to simply visit the following address to open the ADM website https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager. Once inside, please log in to the Manager using your Google account which is in fact the same account synced onto the Android device you have lost.
As soon as you login, a screen will open, showing a map and a section in form of a box. This will have a list of all the devices that you have logged onto using your Google Account. If everything is working fine, the location of your lost device will be loaded onto this map.
This location will help you find your Android device, if you, let’s say, forget it at a place – a store or a restaurant, this will help you in deciding which exact place you left it as if you can not make up your mind about its location given the number of places you visited meanwhile.
However, in case the phone got stolen by someone, we would suggest you to first lock it and clean it off so that your important data stays safe. You can tap on “Lock” and “Erase” respectively to do so. You may even change your lock code using Android Device Manager. Once you have tightened the security of your phone, then you can go down the legal route to recover it.
Though if you misplaced your phone somewhere in the house, this location will not be able to help you much as it would be a rather bigger approximation and show as a circle around/on your house in the map.
Once you have decided where your phone might be, you can use the “Ring” feature from Android Device Manager to ring your Android at a comparatively high volume. This basically will help you locate your device even if you left it with zero ringing volume on silent.
