Road Tales: Help, I lost my iPhone!
What to do when you can't reach Find my?
Apple’s “Find My” app sounds like a dream. Misplace your iPhone (or AirPods, iPad or other Apple product) go to iCloud.com, click the Find My tool and use its system to find exactly where the device is hidden—or residing when stolen. You can play an audio tone to help you find it, you can see on a digital app exactly where the phone’s location is.
But here’s a dirty little secret Apple doesn’t talk about.
You’re out of the country and exploring Canada and your travel companion loses her phone. Not a problem. You open your own iPhone, use the browser to go to iCloud.com, sign in with her credentials and then….
FAIL!
Apple won’t let you connect to her iCloud on your phone without confirming the request via a text message code that’s sent to only one place—you guessed it—Ruth’s iPhone.
So in other words, if you’re traveling and lose your phone, and you don’t have access to your home computer, Watch or iPad—a device Apple can send a text message to, Find My is absolutely worthless.
How to make it work
However, I’ve learned a lot about how to navigate the Find My system since Ruth lost her phone at a Safeway super market in Cranbrook, British Columbia. This is a small town in the East Kootenay Rockies, about an hour from the U.S. border in Montana, near some really cute towns like Kimberly and Fairmont Hot Springs.
Write this down and save it to memory:: If this happens to you, don’t try to access Find My by typing in iCloud.com on your phone and putting in the other person’s credentials to use the system because you won’t be allowed to get through. Here’s what you want to do instead:
Go to iCloud.com/find
This way you can get through!
I initially called Apple tech support and spent some time on the phone trying to come up with some way out of this mess, as I sat at a restaurant in Cranbrook and she ran around town frantically trying to locate the phone without digital assistance.
There are important steps everyone who lives with another iPhone user should take immediately to get around Apple’s two-factor verification system.
Go to Settings → [Your Name] → Sign-in & Security → Trusted Phone Numbers → Add a Trusted Number
Here you can add your phone number as a backup, and have the text message sent there if the other person’s phone is lost.
When I tested it out, it worked as advertised. My phone was listed as a possible place to do the verification. But only at icloud.com/find, not via the general icloud.com address.
How to turn your iPhone off
While I was on the phone with the rep, I asked about the next steps. How to turn the phone off and into a brick, to make it unusable to a person who, say, might have stolen the device.
Here again, the magic answer is icloud.com/find, where you’ll be able to report it as lost, without having to type in the verification code.
How to change your eSim card
What about buying a new phone while on vacation and changing the eSim card? That’s the card that holds your phone number and provides cell service. That, the Apple rep said, was something between Ruth and her phone carrier, which in our case is T-Mobile, which doesn’t operate in Canada. However, this process could be done on the phone, she said.
Great News!
Ruth is famous for losing her phones. Amd just as famous for eventually finding it. The good news is she did indeed find her phone—the old-fashioned way.
We called the Safeway in Cranbrook to ask if they found her phone, and they said no. She returned, and asked in person, and this time they said yes, they had found it in a shopping basket.
Because we use our phones so much in a market, with shopping lists and mobile payments, it’s a given that people would leave their phones behind at a market. But what about the time she placed it in the cheese drawer of our home fridge and forgot about it?
But I disgress. Let’s all work together and come up with a solution for Ruth. What do you think: phone in a holster by her side, or a purse like strap that can hang around her neck? Readers, what should we buy for her? Any suggestions?
Thanks for taking the time to spend time with the newsletter. Greetings from Canada! Next stop on the Photowalks 2025 Western Summer Trip: Missoula, MT! See you next week!
Jeff