How to track your stolen Android phone or tablet

Have you (ever) lost your Android smartphone or tablet without having a device tracking app installed? Then you should read this! This could be your chance to get your precious device back.

Thanks to a new native Android tool, you can now easily locate your phone and (in a worst case scenario) perform a remote data wipe. Read on as we show you how to activate the feature on your phone.

Why Do I Want to Do This?

 Whether you’re just prone to losing your phone in your house or you’re worried about data security if your phone is actually stolen, there’s no good reason to skip turning on the security features available through Android Device Manager. It’s free, it has next to no overhead, and you can access it to locate your device and/or remote wipe it from any computer you can log into your Google account from.

  

What Do I Need?

 

To follow along with this tutorial you’ll need the following things:

• 1 Android device running Android OS 2.2+
• 1 Google account
• Your device is connected with your Google account.
• Allowed ADM to lock your device and erase its data (turned off by default).
• Allowed Android Device Manager (ADM) to locate your device (turned on by default). This can changed in the Google Settings app.
• Your device has access to the internet.

 

Note: While Android Device Manager has been available to Google business account users for some time, Google only started rolling it out to consumer/standard accounts in early August, 2013. If Android Device Manager isn’t on your Android phone yet, check back in a few days to see if you’ve received the update.

Android Device Manager is a Google’s official and easy-to-use tool to track your Android phone or tablet. The best thing about it is that you don’t need to install an app to be able to track your devices. The only requirement is that your device is connected to your Google account, turned on and connected to the internet.

Besides tracking, letting your phone ring and wiping your phone (which has to be enabled manually), Android Device Manager doesn’t offer more options to remote control your phone. Hopefully, Google will work on that and offer more features, such as  taking pictures in case it got stolen and you want to know who took it.
In case there’s no laptop around when you lose your device, you can also use someone else’s Android phone to track it. Instead of using the mobile browser, you can also use the Android Device Manager app. If you the other phone doesn’t have it, simply download it here. You can sign in using the guest mode and your Google account credentials. Now you should be able to track your lost device, let it ring or wipe its data.
Now, Go to https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager

Once you’ve set up the Android Device Manager on your phone, you can begin managing it from the Android Device Manager web portal, available at: https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager. The first time you access the service you’ll need to accept an agreement to allow Android Device Manager to use your location data.

After that, you can select your device from the drop-down menu in the corner and perform one of three tasks.

First, using GPS/Wi-Fi location data from the phone, you can locate the phone. This feature is dependent on recent GPS data, and if the GPS/location functionality has been turned off on the phone for a period of time (say, several days), it will simply report that the location is unavailable.

 

 Second, you can ring the device to locate it if it is in earshot. Even if your phone has the ringer turned off or set to vibrate it will switch to the default ringtone at 100% volume. This is the most practical feature of Android Device Manager as not many people routinely deal with device theft, but many of us are guilty of misplacing our devices.

Finally, you can remotely wipe the device. This function initiates a factory wipe on the device. The portion of the warning “We may not be able to wipe the content of the SD card in your device” is a bit ambiguous. Internal storage designated as /sdcard will be wiped. Removable SD cards may be wiped depending on the hardware/OS version. The business version of Android Device Manager has a specific wipe-SD-card functionality, which if not already deployed in the consumer version of Android Device Manager will likely be deployed in the near future.