Found iPhone that want set up yet can I keep it?

The phone is not yours.

Turn it into the Lost and Found if available, otherwise turn it in to the police.

In general, police typically hold unclaimed found property for 90 to 180 days before disposing of it, selling it at auction, or giving it to the finder. They do not keep anything for themselves. That would make them just as guilty of theft as anyone else who would keep something that did not belong to them.

Holding such items gives the owner a better chance of recovering their item since the first place any intelligent person thinks to look, after looking around the area where they believe they lost it, is a Lost and Found, or a police station.

As lobstershost1 noted, Apple will not help you find the owner. It would be a violation of federal privacy laws to give you such information. That, and their record of who the ORIGINAL owner was doesn't mean the phone hadn't since been legally sold to someone else since then.

If you request it, you can ask the police to contact you when the hold period has expired. In most cases, you can then be made the legal owner of an abandoned item. Even then, that still won't help you get into the phone to make it yours. We can't help you, Apple can't help you. It will be forever locked to the person who lost it.

IdkOrdoi wrote:

When I swiped up it had the set up screen and on the lock screen there was an information icon in the bottom right

I'd like to believe you're a good person, but asking if you can keep something you found, you didn't pay for and clearly someone else did, does not say good things about you. Do the right thing and turn the phone into the local police. It's not your phone. You have to no right to keep it as though it was yours.

No one here will give you any advice on how to set the phone up. It's not your iPhone.

Lost or stolen property, and subject to being remotely bricked by the carrier.

"Finders keepers" is something children think is true. In the world of adults, it's called theft.

And an iPhone 15 that has never been set up? That's incredibly unlikely.

That phone belongs to someone …

… just NOT you.

IdkOrdoi wrote:

Would there be any other way to get it to the owner as the police would probably just keep it and it was just in the middle of nowhere on a footpath

Apple will not help you get the phone back to its rightful and LEGAL owner. You are just trying to justify keeping the phone when you say without any knowledge, what the police will do with the phone. It doesn't matter where the phone was found or what condition it is in.

JUST DO THE RIGHT THING. PERIOD.

IdkOrdoi wrote:

Would there be any other way to get it to the owner as the police would probably just keep it and it was just in the middle of nowhere on a footpath

So, in the last two hours, you have now returned the phone to where you found it? You made this claim in another thread, where you called this community "toxic." If by telling you to to the right thing is toxic, then well, so be it. Since you evidently are no longer in possession of the phone, there really isn't a reason to continue this thread.

Doesn't matter.

We are not going to help you with a phone that you do not own.