In recent years, device location features from Apple, Google, and Samsung have made it easier than ever to find a missing phone. You’re often able to fire up a map on your laptop or another device and see exactly where your handset is. As well as seeing where your phone has ended up, you can get it to ring, and even lock or wipe it remotely.

Now, the Find My Device feature that’s part of Android has received a major upgrade, with key new features that put it more on par with what Apple offers through the Find My app. It’s more comprehensive and gives you more chance of locating your phone—or any of the other device types the network now supports.

What’s New With Find My Device

Find My Device can locate your missing gadgets.Courtesy of David Nield

Find My Device in its original form launched way back in 2013. It means that if your Android phone is enrolled in the service, it reports its location on a regular basis, enabling you to find it on a map (assuming you have another device to log into). Over time the capabilities of Find My Device have expanded to include a select number of Wear OS smartwatches, wireless earbuds, and other accessories.

All of that basic functionality is sticking around, but the new and improved Find My Device—which began going live in the US in April 2024, and across the rest of the world in the following months—brings some notable improvements. For a start, it now works with devices that are offline, so they can still be found even if they aren’t actively connected to the internet.

What’s more, even phones that are powered off or that have dead batteries can be located for “several hours” after they go dark. However, this only applies to certain handsets, including the Pixel 8 series and Pixel 9 series from Google; the phone needs specialized hardware that enables a low-power Bluetooth signal to be broadcast, even if the handset itself isn’t turned on.

Third-party trackers, including those from Pebblebee, now support Find My Device.Courtesy of Pebblebee

Another improvement arriving with the Find My Device upgrade is support for more types of gadgets, from a wider range of manufacturers—like the latest trackers from Chipolo and Pebblebee, for example. This extended support also means Find My Device can warn you, via a message on screen, if someone is using a Bluetooth tracker to try and keep tabs on your location without your knowledge.

A lot of these upgrades are made possible because Google is matching what Apple has done with its iPhones, creating a global, anonymized, crowdsourced network of device locators. Google is essentially getting every Android phone to help in the search for missing gadgets, just like Apple employs every Apple device to help find their missing brethren. If you’ve recently had an email from Google about how your devices will “join the Find My Device network,” this is what it’s talking about.

This crowdsourcing is all protected with end-to-end encryption, and no personal data is shared. Google can’t see who you are, only that your device has spotted someone else’s lost device at a certain location. For more details on the privacy implications, and to learn how Google handles your data, check out the official support page.

How to Use Find My Device

Find My Device can be enabled from Settings on Android.Courtesy of David Nield

Not much has changed after the upgrade when it comes to making use of the Find My Device network that Google provides. It’s all free of charge, and it is worth enrolling your devices into the program in case they ever get misplaced. If you’re shopping for new Android devices or accessories, check for compatibility with the Find My Device network, especially when it comes to features like offline tracking.

The exact steps for signing up for Find My Device vary between devices, but on Pixel phones you’ll be asked if you want to enable the feature when you first set up the handset. You can find the same options later on by going to the main Settings screen, then choosing Security and privacy > Device finders > Find My Device. Turn the toggle switch on to make your device discoverable.

On some phones, including Pixel 8 and Pixel 9 handsets, you’ll see an additional Find your offline devices entry—tap this to choose whether your phone can be found when it’s offline, and whether or not you want your phone to be used to locate other gadgets. Set this to Off if you don’t want your handset to be discoverable when offline, and you don’t want it enrolled in the crowdsourced Find My Device network.

Find My Device gives you options when you’ve located a phone.Courtesy of David Nield

The other options here are Without network, With network in high-traffic areas only, and With network in all areas, and they come with a description of what each one means. Essentially, the more places you’re happy to have your phone form part of the crowdsourced locating network, the more places your own phone can be found—and with greater speed. The more you invest in the network, the more you get from it.

When it comes to keeping tabs on your devices, there’s the Find My Device app for Android. Obviously, you won’t be able to use this app on a lost device because you won’t have access to it. If you can get to the app on a secondary device, you’ll be able to see your registered gadgets on a map, lock and wipe them remotely, and get them to play sounds (very helpful if they’ve fallen down the back of the couch).

There’s also the Find My Device website, which you can sign into using your Google account in any web browser tab. The options are the same here: For any of your devices, you can get their last reported location, get them to make a sound, lock them remotely, or completely factory-reset them remotely if someone else has gotten ahold of them.