Android's Find My Device function still needs work
My lost phone didn't benefit from the latest update to the system
Remember when I recently wrote about how much I hated slippery phones? And how I didn't want to have to put a case on my phone? Well apparently it was fortuitous timing or I just jinxed myself.
Whatever the reason, I managed to lose my phone. And this was almost certainly a situation where its slipperiness caused it to fall out of a pocket. Had the phone had a grippy case or just been made out of a material that didn't want to shoot out of my pocket so badly, it maybe wouldn't have been lost.
I'm fairly certain that the phone departed my company somewhere along a bike path. I don't recall hearing a crash as it hit the ground, but I was fully-phoned when climbing onto my bike and I was totally phone-less upon dismounting. So I'm going to assume that's what happened.
Oh well, things happen. I'm not too bent out of shape about it. Everything lives in the cloud these days. It's amazing how quickly a new phone can feel exactly like your old phone once the all the data has transferred over. It also gave me an excuse to replace my Bay Blue Pixel Pro 8 with an even more fun Aloe Green color on the Pixel 8a. A slightly different Pixel, but more or less the same experience. Maybe I'll talk more about my Pixel 8a experience soon with the looming arrival of the Pixel 9 in October.
Anyway, this isn't really a story about replacing a lost phone. It's about the way that Android handles lost phones through the Find My Device feature. I believe this was the first time that I actually needed to use the feature and it was an incredible disappointment. Let's take a deeper look.
First, how is the process supposed to work?
Every modern Android device comes pre-installed with a Find My Device app. This allows you to setup some parameters on how to find your phone if it's been misplaced. Typically, I know that my phone was just left somewhere in my house and I need it to make a sound to alert me. Sure, you can always have a friend call your phone for you if they're nearby. But smart watches and smart home speakers are even easier.
I've asked my Google Home speakers "Where's my phone?" plenty of times. And it always resulted in a happy chime coming from my phone that was usually slipping into a couch cushion or left under something that blocked my view of it. That had been the extent of my Android device finding until recently.
The other key component of the finding process is seeing your device on a map. Now, this is obviously not too useful if you know that you left your phone somewhere in your house. But this seems super helpful if you're 99% sure that you dropped your phone along a pretty straightforward bike path. I thought that the app could easily give me a pinpoint location to backtrack on my bike to find either the phone on the ground or at least in the hands or backpack of enterprising citizen who also happened to be traversing the trail that day.
Nope, the app couldn't give me a location. It could tell me that my phone was last seen 9 hours ago in my home. Hmm, that's really helpful! My phone had a full charge and I had used it right before biking home. It should have had full connectivity and for some reason it didn't register on the find my device app.
And there is really nothing more to do at this point. I tried to use the app to ring the phone. I couldn't hear it in my house. I tried ringing it along the bike path but to no avail. I suppose there is a chance that the fall to the ground made it inoperable but that seems pretty unlikely.
So what options was I left with? I could "secure" the device whatever that means. I guess it just meant locking the screen which should have already been locked anyway. I also had the option to create a message that would show up on the screen if anyone found the phone. I thought this would easily get it back in my hands. I wrote up a nice not and asked the fine samaritan to give my wife's phone number a ring if they recently came into possession of the device.
Nope, no phone calls or texts came. I even updated the wording a few times to be cheeky and offer up a reward if the person contacted me. Still nothing. I have to assume that the message wasn't received. I imagine if Google could only tell me the phone was last seen 9 hours ago, they probably couldn't update my reward message to the potential new owner of my phone.
There was only one last nuclear option. Once I was convinced that the phone wasn't coming back (which I never was fully convinced of, seeing how I think it was left on a bike path and may not have been seen for a while rather than stolen straight away) I could remotely wipe it of all my data. It's an option that may give some peace of mind if you didn't have a passcode locking your phone. But this would also mean that I'd forego all potential remote Find My Device options. I wouldn't be able to try ringing it again or hope that it would retrieve a signal and show up on the GPS map.
All-in-all, the Android Find My Device process was pretty awful for me. It's not like I lost the phone in the middle of the Mojave desert either. It was on an urban bike path in the Bay Area. That's the perfect place to be retrieved by clever technology! If it can't work here, than can it really work anywhere?
Once I got my new phone setup, I checked out the latest Pixel Feature Drop software update. Lo and behold, the long-awaited updated to the Find My Device was included! Did I actually lose my phone the day before a major software update was released to greatly improve this piss poor technique of retrieving a lost device? If my old phone had been in my hands for a few more hours, would it have received that update and been much easier to find? It sure seems that way.
I realize that losing a phone is a major first world problem. I was obviously a bit peeved by the lackluster device finding experience but I was fortunate to get a new phone set up pretty quickly with no major consequence besides an unexpected expense in my budget. And no I don't actually blame myself for not putting a case on the phone. It likely would have been dropped either way. Now if I found the phone and it was totally smashed, then I could have maybe been kicking myself for stubbornly eschewing some sort of protection.
Will the new Find My Device process prevent something like this in the future? It seems so, but it's really hard to test something like this. I may actually be up for the experiment of planting the phone somewhere along the same bike path to see if I can retrieve it using the app. The biggest upgrade is the ability to still find your phone after its battery has died. As long as there are other devices within a reasonable distance, you should still be able to pinpoint your dead phone. Although a dead battery wasn't the reason why my phone wasn't reachable. It was fully charged and in a location that should have had cellular service. And yet there was still something causing it to go un-rescued. Will things like this still happen? Is this system still far behind Apple's Find My efforts? I think the answer is yes to both accounts.
Has anyone had a similar experience with a Find My app? Or have you had a miracle story where the app actually led you to a reunion with your prized device?
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week!
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Oof. Losing a phone sucks. My condolences!