Find a Misplaced iPhone by Making it Beep Remotely from iCloud

Don’t you hate it when you misplace your iPhone and can’t find it? Or when it slides between the couch cushions or under a pile of laundry and you spend 20 minutes checking every possible place in the house to no avail? The old trick is to call the iPhone from another phone, but if you don’t have another phone handy that’s not particularly helpful. The good news is that if you lost your iPhone at home then just about all of us have a computer or tablet laying around with access to the web, and from there you can use iCloud.com and Find My iPhone to help find your missing iPhone (or iPad and iPod touch).

Sure, Find My iPhone is intended primarily for much broader truly lost or stolen iOS devices, but you can also use it in your own home or office when you just misplaced an iPhone, iPad, or iPod and you want some help finding it, which for some of us is a fairly frequent occurrence.

To be able to use this feature you will need to have set up Find My iPhone on the device you’re looking to find, which is part of iCloud and is usually on by default for most iOS users these days.

• Head over to iCloud.com and login to your Apple ID, or launch the Find My iPhone app on another iOS device


• Choose “Find My iPhone” and let the service locate your missing iOS device


• Select the device on the map, then click the (i) button to summon more information about the device


• Choose the “Play Sound” option (prior versions may say “Send Message” instead, with sound playing as an option)


• The iPhone (or iPad, or iPod touch) will start making a loud pinging sound, now is the time to hunt around for it

The pinging locator sound is quite loud, ignoring both the mute switch on the device and the current volume level, and it will repeat continuously until any button is pressed on the iOS device itself.

Going further, if you think you have truly lost the device or it actually was stolen, you can use iCloud and Find My iPhone to remotely wipe any iOS device and prevent the thief from accessing any of your data or contacts. That’s a bit on the extreme side though, so remote wipe is really best used when you know for certain a device is gone for good.