Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

electronicsguy

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 12, 2015
570
253
Pune, India
Hello,
I just learnt this trick and thought of sharing with others. If you turn off location services on your phone, you cannot track it right (duh!). However, you can still goto www.icloud.com, into find my iphone and then in the list of devices tied to your account, put that phone in "lost" mode.

What this does is, whenever your lost device will have internet connection (wifi or cellular), it'll display the 'lost phone...' message on your phone, lock it and also turn ON the location service on your phone. You can check it yourself. Once you do this, watch the status bar on top of your phone and reload the find my iphone page on icloud.com. The arrow will indicate that your phone is being tracked and the location will soon pop-up on the web interface.

One you enter the code on your phone, it emails you saying "phone has been found" and keeps location services disabled, just as it was before.

enjoy!
 
I assume you have to have at least Find My iPhone enabled on the phone though (even if Location Services are turned off), right?
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.