FindMyDevice

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Let's delve into a very interesting application for finding your mobile phone if it is lost. From FindMyDevice we have already talked about it in the article Alternatives to Google Find Your Phone. Since it seems like a beautiful and well-made application, we thought it would be interesting to delve deeper with an ad hoc article.

One of the functions that may be missing more than others when we decided to degoogle our smartphone, it could be precisely that called “Find your phone“. Google indeed has full power on your smartphone therefore thanks to the login on your Google account you can control it remotely, make it ring, geolocate it and so on.

On the other hand, the developer of FindMyDevice explains clearly why he decided to create this application: “I lost my new phone, and since I don't use Google services, I was never able to locate it again“.

FindMyDevice, finds your smartphone thanks to an SMS

As we have already seen in the past there are alternatives Open source for a fee, like Prey, which allow you to do more or less the same things. Also FindMyDevice, which we will talk about in detail today, allows you to do the same for free and without the need to register on external accounts.

To work FindMyDevice, Indeed. use only and exclusively SMS!

First of all, once the application is installed you will have to give it many permissions. For obvious reasons the permissions requested by FindMyDevice there will be many because he will always have access to your smartphone to respond to requests that arrive via SMS.

Once you have completed the initial installation phase and given all the permissions necessary for it to function, you can finally begin to set your preferences.

ATTENTION: for one of the authorizations you need a special permission which you can activate only by connecting the smartphone to the computer and following the instructions. It is not mandatory and is only used to activate geolocation if you have always deactivated it. If you are used to keeping it active all the time you can ignore this setting.

The functioning of FindMyDevice it's very simple. From the settings, choose a command that will activate the application. By default the command is: fmd. You can put whatever you want or leave this one if you are afraid of forgetting it.

The commands to run the app

The default commands are:

• fmd locate
  • will respond by sending you the GPS coordinates
• fmd ring
  • will make the smartphone ring
• fmd lock
  • will lock your smartphone. In the settings you can also decide to display a message when the phone is locked. You might want to put something like: “If you find it, call me at xxx-xxxxxxx”
• fmd stats
  • will send you the device information
• fmd delete
  • It will allow you to remotely reset your cell phone

You can also enter favorite numbers as approved numbers. Means that these commands will only work if they are received by a certain number. This setting is important to prevent anyone, even just jokingly, from resetting your smartphone remotely or making it ring at any time.

Once you have set everything up correctly, simply send an SMS to your smartphone from an approved number saying: “fmd ring” to make it play or “fmd locate” to find out where it is.

And so a great alternative to Google's Find My Phone especially if you have the possibility of having a secondary smartphone in your hands from a person you trust.

FindMyDevice and real-time location

What we told you about is only part of the operation of FindMyDevice. It is in fact possible to register on a server to always obtain the position of your smartphone in real time.

Registration is free and works well on all smartphones, however we had some problems on a degoogled phone and from what we could read we are not the only ones.

Uninstallation

It was brought to our attention by email that uninstalling FindyMyDevice can be a bit complex. This happens because it is necessary to give it special permissions which, before you can uninstall the app, must be removed. We made a video to better explain how the uninstallation procedure works.

How server registration works

If you have a normal smartphone, just go to the section FMD-Server, enable everything and then press “Register on Server“. Accept the conditions of use, decide every how many minutes the position should be reported and whether only the GPS data should be used or also that of the cell phone to which you are connected.

If you have a de-googled smartphone, you must necessarily download the application first UP-FCM Distributor. You can then activate localization through the server offered by Null. As mentioned, this setting didn't work for us immediately but we had to reinstall FindMyDevice and repeat the operation from the beginning to make it work.

If you can make it work anyway it's very interesting because it allows you to speak with your smartphone without the aid of SMS but only via a graphical interface. You can locate it, make it ring, block it or delete all the data inside it.

Write down somewhere the URL of the server, the code given to you to identify your smartphone and the password you chose previously.

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