Find a lost Android, iPhone or Windows phone

Prepare now to help you find a lost Android, iOS or Windows phone. Marie Brewis reports

If you’ve lost your phone, it’s not necessarily gone forever. But don’t wait until you lose your phone to prepare: you’ll need to configure it now to enable you to find a lost Android, iPhone or Windows phone. Here’s how to set up phone tracking and how to find your phone.

Note that the solutions offered in this tutorial will require that your phone to be switched on in order to give you an accurate idea of its location, and to access options to remotely lock or wipe it. If your battery runs out or your phone is stolen and switched off, you may be out of luck. For that reason it’s imperative that you back up everything now, just in case you can’t get it back.

How to locate a lost Android phone

Device Manager offers the easiest way to track an Android phone. You don’t need to have the app installed on your phone to use it, but you do need to check that your settings are correctly configured before you lose it.

To start using Device Manager, open the Google Settings app (not the phone’s own Settings app) and tap on Security. Under Device Manager ensure the options to ‘Remotely locate this device’ and ‘Allow remote lock and erase’ are enabled. .

Over the following pages, we’ll consider the options built into each major mobile operating system to explain how to track your lost or stolen phone. For each of these you will need to be signed into either your Google, Apple or Windows account on the phone before you begin.

Some third-party options are also available. Prey (preyproject. com) is a popular option, available not only for mobile devices but also Windows, OS X and Ubuntu laptops. If you have several devices spanning multiple platforms, it’s worth considering an option such as this, which lets you track them all from a single interface.