X
Samsung Wants To Make Sure You Can Always Find Your Lost Phone

Samsung Wants To Make Sure You Can Always Find Your Lost Phone

By Justin Diaz
August 24, 2020

Samsung is intent on making sure you can always find your lost phone. It’s coming via a new update the company is sending out to the Find My Mobile app on devices, starting today.

Phones can be expensive. Especially if they’re newer flagship Samsung devices. But sometimes losing devices is inevitable.

That doesn’t mean however that it has to be impossible to find them. Samsung of course is not guaranteeing that the new app update will find a lost device every time. The update should make it more likely though, which is perhaps some peace of mind, and that’s still a good thing.

The update can help find your Samsung phone even if it’s offline

The big part of this update is the new feature that’s being added. It allows the Find My Mobile app to find your phone even if the phone is offline.

Typically you’d need the phone to have a connection to the internet. And then the app would ping that internet connected device. That no longer has to be the case though.

If you’re wondering how the app could possibly find your device without it being connected to the internet, the short of it is that it uses other nearby devices.

According to Max Weinbach on Twitter (via 9To5Google), the feature will allow other Galaxy devices to scan for nearby Galaxy devices. This also works both ways. So your phone could be used to scan for nearby devices too. The feature does have to be enabled on both ends though.

Say for example you lose your Galaxy Note 20 Ultra with this feature enabled. If there are no nearby Galaxy devices that also have it enabled, then no scan can be completed.

You can encrypt your offline location

If you’re worried about security, it seems that Samsung has thought of this as well.

As a sub-option under the offline finding mode once enabled, there’s a toggle for encrypting your device’s offline location. This way only you should know what the location of device is and it won’t be possible for other people to track it down.

In addition to finding your phone while offline, the new feature will also make it possible to find other Galaxy devices. Such as the Galaxy Buds Live or a Galaxy Watch 3.

Considering all these devices can be somewhat easy to lose, this will come in handy. It goes without saying this is strictly a Galaxy device feature. So don’t expect to find your new Pixel Buds this way unless Google comes out with its own version.