Find my iPhone - prevent from theif turning it off with passcode?

absolutely agree...the device should require the passcode to allow someone to switch it off..sounds terribly simple, right? that way find my iPhone would have some real use apart from finding it when it's on silent or under a pillow...

And exactly how would that work, given the fact that the sleep/wake button is a hardware switch, not a software switch.

Sleep isn't the same as off though is it.

Whilst asleep, Find My iPhone still works.

By holding the Home and Sleep buttons until the slider appears, Apple could then build in a passcode request to switch the phone off.

Not a bad idea

Dave,

You can turn the phone off by pressing both the sleep/wake button & home button at the same time. As I've said. they are hardware switches, not software.

Yes they are, but the operation to turn the phone off is software controlled. They are not hardware pole switches which disconnnect the battery

And exactly how, using software, do you prevent someone from pressing both the sleep/wake button & home button at the same time to turn the phone off?

You can't. But what you can do is, when the buttons have been pressed, tell the operating system to take the dual button button press as a request to switch off the phone. At that point you tell the OS to generate a passcode request screen.

Currently the OS takes the dual button press as a simple request to power down the phone and just switchesit off with no validation

Ain't gonna happen, given the fact that you use this technique to also troubleshoot a non-performing iPhone.

But is is possible 🙂

The reality is, given the present iOS & physical design of an iPhone, there is no practical way to prevent a thief from turning the device off. Thieves seem to be smarter than users, and all seem to know they only have to turn the phone off to defeat Find My Phone.

So there is a way, and I realise this may be coming a year late, this only applies to Jailbroken idevices also. An app called iLocalis.

iLocalis is and app that transmits the location of the phone discretely at set intervals to a server, it had user defined intervals and a web access terminal much the same as Find My iPhone HOWEVER it has an option to disable the power off button.

With the disable power off enabled you can hold the power button until you are blue in the face and get nowhere but locking the iPhone. Also, holding the home and power button will trigger a soft reset, but the iPhone will power on to the pass code screen regardless. The only way to prevent the phone being tracked with iLocalis under Jailbreak are:

Remove the sim card, location would be stored on the phone and uploaded at next date connection.

Wait until the phone dies.

The buttons themselves are prices of hardware, but they don't Activate hardware on the phone, it's just a machine executing a command on the iOS so it can be changed, by Apple... Or a jailbreak developer. Of which I am not.

Hope this helps! ( for my first post )

As your first post - you should have read the forum TOS - not allowed to talk about jailbroken phones in these forums.

People say that thiefs are not that smart. In fact they are not always desparet thiefs out there. Most of them are make living of this and see this as a job.

So what I'm saying is most of them are smart and know to turn off phones right after make the run. BUT, not all of them know how to hard reset an iphone.

By including a closing code to the regular swich off screen would give almost a 50% bigger chance to prevent switching off the phone ang give a bigger chance to track the phone.

Better than nothing right 😉

OR, you could just program the gps module to be active all the time. Also while it is turned off.

I could live with the loss of a bit energy instead of the possibility of never seeing my phone again.