Find My iPhone

How to have the LED flash of your iPhone light up when pinging it from your Apple Watch

Pinging iPhone using Apple Watch

Apple Watch owners can easily find their misplaced iPhone by tapping a dedicated icon in the watchOS Control Center, which causes their connected iPhone to emit a high-pitched sound. I've been using this trick since Apple Watch came out to locate my iPhone, which shows an unnerving tendency to disappear under a pile of laundry or slide sneakily between the couch cushions.

You can find your iPhone even faster, especially at night, by having its LED flash illuminate a few times when pinged from your wrist. Here's how to do that.

‘IfFound 3’ makes it easier for good Samaritans to return your lost iOS device

Nothing gives you a lower-sinking gut feeling than when you accidentally leave your $650+ iPhone sitting somewhere and forget about it, or when it ends up stolen.

Fortunately, good Samaritans now have an easier way to get in touch with you if your device is ever found thanks to a recent Cydia release called IfFound 3.

Indeed this jailbreak tweak is a new iteration of a tweak that has existed for ages, but it's back and it's ready for iOS 9, and in this review, we'll show you exactly how it works.

New in iOS 9: Lost Mode switches on Low Power Mode automatically

The new Low Power Mode option in iOS 9 allows users to eek out more battery life by disposing battery draining features such as parallax effects, throttling down CPU performance, and disabling background app refresh. In all, Low Power Mode can provide users with up to 3 additional hours of battery life.

In iOS 9, Apple is allowing Find My iPhone's Lost Mode, a mode that lets you to mark your iPhone as being lost, to use Low Power Mode at the same time. By doing so, lost iPhones have an even greater chance of recovery due to being able to stay on for a longer period of time.

Teen gets shot dead after tracking down his lost phone

We often read success stories about how people use Find My iPhone or other tracking tools to locate their lost or stolen smartphone and end up recovering it. But we easily forget there is a sad flip side to these kind of stories, and the death of Canadian teenager Jeremy Cook is the tragic reminder of that.

iCloud.com’s Find My iPhone replaces Google with Apple Maps for all users

Nearly two years after supplanting the stock Google Maps iOS app with its own much-maligned service that resulted in Scott Forstall's ousting, Apple's web-based Find My iPhone service available over at iCloud.com seems to have adopted Apple Maps backend for all users, reports 9to5Mac.

Previously, using the web-based version of Find My iPhone used to rely on Google Maps data. The move could indicate plans to roll out a web-based Apple Maps accessible to anyone through a web browser, allowing the iPhone maker to better compete with Google Maps.

Apple releases tool to check the Activation Lock status of iOS devices

Apple recently released a tool that lets anyone check the Activation Lock status of iOS devices. Introduced along iOS 7, Activation Lock is a security feature that prevents anyone from erasing or activating your iOS device without entering your Apple ID and password first. The feature must be disabled before a device is passed or sold to another person. Failure to do so renders the device unusable for the new owner.

With the release of this new tool, Apple wants to make the process of checking for Activation Lock easier, and prevent people from buying a device that might have been locked because it was lost, stolen, or simply because the previous owner forgot remove the device from his account.

Apple reportedly patches Find My iPhone vulnerability to hack Apple ID accounts

According to The Next Web this morning, Apple has allegedly patched a security hole in the Find My iPhone service which allowed nefarious users to brute-force Apple ID passwords, according to Twitter user @hackappcom who posted a proof of concept titled 'iBrute' to GitHub on Saturday.

This should be good news for celebrities who reported their iCloud accounts being hacked and saw their nude pictures posted online.

As Cody told you yesterday, Academy Award winner Jennifer Lawrence and several other celebrities found themselves in the middle of a major nude photo leak after attackers apparently exploited a vulnerability in Apple’s Find My iPhone service.

New service offers permanent Activation Lock bypass

Chronic Unlocks has recently started offering a new service which claims to bypass Activation Lock on iOS devices that have been locked. Although the method used to get around the security measure has yet to be detailed, the service can be helpful for people who bought an iOS device that is still tied to its previous owner's Apple ID. But don't expect the company to help you bypass Activation Lock on a stolen device!

Apple drops Google Maps for own maps in a new beta of the Find My iPhone web app

It would seem that Google gave way to Apple Maps on the web in a new Find My iPhone beta, which was released yesterday alongside iOS 8 Beta 3 and the third OS X Yosemite Developer Preview.

At the time of this writing, the change appeared to affect Apple's Find My iPhone beta on the web, which has switched from Google Maps tiles to an Apple Maps backend. For those wondering, the native iOS app stopped using Google Maps in 2012...