Finding a forever lost iPhone

Unless you're really lucky and the person who got your iPhone is so altruistic to go and succeed in returning it to you, there are too many issues with getting it back - unlike it may appear, specially if you did sign up for Find My Phone. That service do almost no good in actual retrieving a lost phone - except to help that selfless one with sending an informative message. It can only truly helps in locking and wiping it. Even if you're lucky to get the phone location, unless it's stationary somewhere you have been, you won't have any chance on pin-pointing its exact location. There are some apps out there that improve slightly on this by adding camera images - but then again you have to be really lucky it's a stupid thief.

The best measure I've seem so far to have any real chance of finding it would be Rewarding Return. You put their label on your valuable which gives a link to their website in which the person who finds it can claim a reward you've set. And they pay for all shipping costs (probably within USA only). Nobody needs such a service to apply the idea, but it sure makes easier to who have access to it.

All methods so far only helps if you've prepared yourself before hand and, yet, none of them helps if the device was actually stolen - which is way more likely to happen. Because the first thing a thief will do is turn off the device. And of course he is not looking for a lame reward and specially not to face the victim again - unless it's for stealing more stuff.

By all means, do take all measures above - you may be lucky on your lost device. But here I'm requesting Apple to take deeper measures and help their costumers get a true peace of mind on their expensive investment. Yeah, I understand specially in USA there are many law enforcements that could hurt Apple if they take a stance here. But there's at very least 1 thing that Apple should do and they're not doing. And I would like to believe they are trying to come up with a solution to make "Find My Phone" an actual good solution able to work even if you didn't register and specially even if the phone gets wiped or hacked as ****. On the next apple link we can also see "Apple does not have a process to track or flag lost or stolen product". But, c'mon, of course the tecnology exists and the process probably isn't at our hands just because of bureocractic law issues!

Unlike Apple seem to claim, there's usually close to nothing the local law enforcement can do to help us finding any lost or stolen belongings and the carrier also have limited data on their hands to help on something that should be close to trivial for Apple to do. AT&T do show a capability to locate any phone, but that's not something every carrier do and I can't be sure (since I don't live in USA to try it) if that really can help finding any stolen device - I would guess it only works for the registered SIM so it's not per device.

In the end I just want to do one request to Apple here: please, allow the IMEI lock on iPhone to lock the whole phone and turn it into a piece of useless brick - not just losing the phone functionality! Bonus points to only allow it to keep sending the signals to towers with its location!!

The first measure alone can potentially reduce iPhone theft to zero, because if enough stolen phone gets reported - and iPhone users do tend to be very fond to their gadget - the thieves will regret going through all the trouble. The second measure, of course, is the what we all hope (and some people like myself use to expect) from "Find My Phone" - a great Apple service to lead us to always find our phone.

And if you read this far, you can do something to help us all: file a feedback request and link it to here! Maybe our voice can be heard. 🙂

Thanks for reading!