How to Track an iPhone (Find My and iCloud.com)

Open the Find My app on another Apple device, tap Devices at the bottom, then tap your iPhone's name to see it on a map. If you have no other Apple device, sign in at icloud.com/find in any browser and use Find Devices instead. Both routes only work if Find My iPhone was already switched on before the phone went missing.

The awkward part of how to track an iPhone is that almost all of the work happens before you lose it. There is no way to switch Find My on remotely, so a phone that left the house with the setting off cannot be located at all — not by you, not by Apple, and not by your carrier.

So this guide covers two things: confirming the setting is on while you still have the phone in your hand, and the exact taps for finding it once it is somewhere else. Everything below is the current layout in iOS 26, which did not change the Find My workflow.

Turn on Find My before you need it

1. Open Settings and tap your name at the very top.

2. Tap Find My, then tap Find My iPhone and switch Find My iPhone on.

3. On the same screen, turn on Find My network. This is what lets a nearby stranger's Apple device anonymously relay your phone's position when your phone has no Wi-Fi or cellular signal of its own.

4. Turn on Send Last Location. When the battery gets critically low, the phone sends its position to Apple one final time before it dies.

Those last two toggles are the difference between a useful map pin and a dead end, and both are off for some people who set their phone up years ago. It is worth checking now rather than at the moment you need it.

How to track an iPhone from another Apple device

This is the fastest route if you own an iPad, a Mac, or a partner's iPhone signed into the same Apple Account.

1. Open the Find My app and tap Devices along the bottom.

2. Tap your iPhone's name. If it can be located, it appears on the map. If it cannot, you see No location found under the name — scroll to Notifications and turn on Notify When Found, and you will get an alert the moment it reconnects.

3. Use the buttons on the device card. Play Sound rings the phone for roughly two minutes, which is the right first move when you think it is in the house. If the phone is offline you will see Sound Pending, and the sound plays the next time it finds a network.

4. Tap Directions to hand the pin over to Maps, which is more useful than it sounds once the phone is more than a street away.

5. If it is genuinely gone rather than misplaced, scroll to the Lost Mode section and turn it on. Lost Mode locks the phone with a passcode, lets you put a message and a contact number on the screen, and suspends the payment cards and passes in Wallet. Apple sends a confirmation email when it activates. If the phone is offline, the card shows Pending until it comes back online.

Tracking from a browser, including on Android

You do not need a second Apple device to track an iPhone. Go to icloud.com/find in any browser and sign in with your Apple Account. The web app is called Find Devices — it used to be branded Find iPhone, which is why older guides send you looking for the wrong name.

Two-factor authentication normally sends a code to a trusted device, which is a problem when the trusted device is the phone you have lost. Apple's workaround is on the sign-in screen: select the Find Devices button at the bottom of the window to continue without a code. If you are stuck at the password itself, our guide on how to find your Apple ID password covers the reset path.

One difference worth knowing: the web version shows a last known location for up to 24 hours, while the Find My app on a phone keeps showing it for up to seven days. Same data, different retention.

Does it work when the iPhone is switched off?

On a supported iPhone with Find My network turned on, yes — Apple documents location reporting for up to 24 hours after the phone is turned off, and up to five hours once it has dropped into power reserve mode. The phone keeps a low-power Bluetooth beacon alive so the Find My network can still relay it.

Apple says only "a supported iPhone" and does not publish a model list for this, so we will not pretend to one. Reporting from several outlets points to iPhone 11 and later, excluding the SE and the "e" models, but that is an inference from Apple's Ultra Wideband availability page rather than something Apple states. The reliable check is on the phone itself: hold the power button as if to switch it off, and look for the line about the iPhone still being findable after power off beneath the slider.

What Find My does not do

It does not give you a location history. You get where the phone is now, or where it last reported — not a trail of everywhere it has been today. Nothing in Find My reconstructs a route.

It stops after seven days. If a phone has not contacted the Find My network for more than seven days, the app shows No location found and there is nothing left to work with.

It cannot help with a phone that was never set up. A device with Find My switched off before it was lost does not appear at icloud.com/find at all, and cannot be marked as lost or erased remotely.

Turning off Bluetooth defeats the offline half. The Find My network is Bluetooth-based, so a phone with Bluetooth disabled is only findable while it has Wi-Fi or cellular.

One more that trips people up: if you remotely erase the phone, leave it in your Find My list. Apple is explicit that removing it also removes Activation Lock, which is the thing making the handset difficult to resell. If you end up replacing it, restoring the new iPhone from a backup is the next step.

Common questions

Can I track a family member's iPhone? Only if they have chosen to share their location with you. In a Family Sharing group the organiser can set location sharing up, but each member then decides individually whether to share. Apple notes that children and teens with Screen Time enabled may not be able to change that setting themselves.

Do they get told when I look? No. The notification fires once, when someone starts or restarts sharing their location with you — not each time the location is viewed. The exception Apple documents is Precision Finding, where the person is notified that someone is trying to locate them. Anyone sharing their location can stop at any time, and the other side is not told when they do.

What can family members do without location sharing? More than you might expect. Apple's documentation says they can still see whether a device is online or offline, play a sound on it, put it in Lost Mode, or erase it remotely — location sharing only governs the map.

If the option isn't there

If Find My is missing or greyed out, check Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services and confirm Location Services is on and that Find My has permission. A managed or work-issued iPhone may also have the setting locked by its administrator.

If you cannot erase the phone from the Find My app, that is expected behaviour without two-factor authentication on your Apple Account — use icloud.com/find instead, which allows it. And if you turned on Stolen Device Protection and recently changed your password, Apple warns that device locations may not be visible for a while. That is a deliberate delay, not a fault.

Finally, remember what you are actually doing here. You can track an iPhone to a building, not to a pocket. When the phone is genuinely stolen rather than lost, file a police report and contact your carrier to blacklist the handset. Find My can tell you where a phone is; it cannot get it back for you, and Apple will not retrieve it on your behalf.