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Find Me!
Remote Text Commands
Help Find and Secure your lost phone |
| Find Me! is an Android utility that helps you find your phone if it is misplaced, lost, or stolen. You can send your phone password protected text message instructions and get back responses to help locate or secure your
phone. This will work from any other phone that can send text messages. Here's the list of commands you can text to your phone:
- Ring - Turn up your ringer volume and start ringing.
- GPS - Texts you back with the phone's gps location.
- GPS,on- Turn on (or off) GPS on your phone.*
- Password - set or change your phone password.
- Lock - lock your phone and set the lockout time.
- Ringer - set your ringer volume from 0 - 100%.
- Notify - set your notification volume from 0 - 100%.
- Status - texts back with information including battery level, if gps is enabled, and wifi status.
- Send - sends a text message from your phone to another phone remotely.
- "Friendly phone number" This is a phone number that will be notified automatically if your phone's SIM card is changed or the phone number is changed. You can also send a text from this number to recover your Find Me password should you forget it.
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Send comments and suggestions to rmicaletti@gmail.com |
| All text commands you send to your phone must be preceded by the password you set in the Find Me setup, a comma, and then the command. Some commands may have an optional parameter for that command preceded by another comma. Passwords are case sensitive, commands
are not. For example if your password is "Myword",
to ring your phone 10 times you would text "Myword,ring,10". |
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| Command |
What it does. |
| Ring,xx |
Turns up ringer volume to 100% and starts ringing. xx is the number of times to ring between 1 and 25. If the number is omitted the phone will ring 10 times. If your phone is misplaced and the ringer is off or turned down, this will help locate your phone. |
| GPS |
This will text back to the sending phone a link to your phone's location in google maps. You will initially get back the phone's last known location (which could be too old) and the phone will begin requesting location updates. After a few minutes you will get back the best
location it can acquire. Accuracy is greatly improved if GPS is on. See details and technical notes on the gps command below. |
GPS,on
GPS,off |
Attempt to turn your Phone's GPS on or off. *This feature may not work on all phone models or Android versions. You should test it to see if you can depend on this working should you lose your phone. |
Password,xxxxxxx
(requires admin permissions. see below) |
If your phone is lost or stolen you can set or change your password to prevent someone from accessing data in your phone. xxx... is the new password between 4 and 11 characters. A confirmation is sent to the sending phone confirming the new password. You can also use this if
your forgot your phone password (If you know the Find Me password) See technical notes. |
Lock,xx
(requires admin permissions) |
Lock your phone, and optionally set the maximum time to lock to xx seconds (between 1 and 900). If a password is set for the phone it will need to be entered afterward to access the phone. See technical notes. |
| Ringer,xxx |
Sets the ringer volume to xxx volume where xxx is a percentage between 0 and 100%. If xxx is omitted 100% is used. |
| Notify,xxx |
Sets the notification volume to xxx volume where xxx is a percentage between 0 and 100%. If your phone is lost or stolen and you are texting it commands (such as gps) the person with the phone will not be notified that text messages are being received. |
| Status |
Texts back the battery level (0-100%), whether gps is enabled on the phone, a list of available wifi networks in range, and whether the phone is connected to a wifi network. You could use this to help locate or just to find out if your phone is turned on and how long the
battery may last. |
| Recover password |
This command can only be sent from the "Friendly" phone number you created in Find Me setup. No password is required for this command and the full text message must be "recover password". If you lose your phone and have forgotten your Find Me password,
send this text from the friendly phone and it will text back your Find Me password. |
| "Someone has changed my phone number!" |
This is not a command but is sent automatically to the friendly phone number if the phone's number is changed. If your phone is stolen, the thief could insert a new SIM card in the phone or otherwise register the phone to a new user. On boot up the phone checks the phone's
current number against the one setup in Find Me. If it has changed it will text the new phone number, the carrier (such as Sprint), and additional information if available. You could use this information to help catch the thief and you could text back a password change
to disable the phone. |
| Send,xxx,yyyy |
Tell your phone to send a text message to the phone number xxx, with text message yyyy (up to 160 characters). I don't know why you would want to do this, but you can. The message would appear to come from your phone. |
| Register me,xxxxxx |
No guarantees, but if you've already lost your phone you can purchase Find Me on the web at the Android Market and Google will attempt to push and install the app to your phone. But before you can use it, you must set a password. Text it the command "Register me,xxxxxx" where
xxx... is a password of at least 6 characters. If the phone and app are working you will get a text response and you can begin sending gps commands. This will not work to change an existing Find Me password remotely. This will only work if the app has never been set up and is freshly installed.
At any rate, you'll already own Find Me for your next phone. |
| Technical Notes |
Administrator permissions. During Setup you have the option of enabling Find Me as a device administrator. If you don't want to enable the device administrator permission, the Password and Lock commands will not work but all others
will still function. If you do enable the administrator you will not be able to uninstall the application until you disable it by going to "Settings-Security-Select Device Administrators" and deactivating the administrator permissions.
You can set up a "Friendly" phone number to access certain commands and features. If you set up a friendly phone number you can recover your Find Me password by texting "recover password" from this phone only. This phone number will also automatically receive notification
if the phone's SIM card or phone number has changed. The friendly number should be entered as numbers only (such as 9991231234 - no formatting). You can set up your phone number as the friendly phone number just for testing and then change it. Hint. You don't necessarily have to tell the person
whose phone number you set up. If you need to recover your password or your phone is lost you can let them know at that time.
The set up screen also displays your phone number and allows you to change it. This is done only for the purpose of testing the "Someone has Changed My Phone Number" feature. If you change it the notification will be sent out the next time the phone is booted. Make sure to change it
back after testing or these messages will be sent on every phone boot up. |
| Notes on Commands |
| GPS. Texting the gps command will result in one or more text message responses with the phone's location. This location will be more accurate if the gps radio is turned on, but may be accurate enough to locate your
phone even if it is not. Each location message will include the location, the time it was acquired, an estimated accuracy in yards, and the location provider (either gps or network). Upon receiving this command the phone will immediately text back its last know location (if any). Pay close attention
to the time on the first location because it may be too old to be of value. Afterwards the phone will begin requesting location updates for a short period, and then text back it's most accurate location. If gps is on, this should take no longer than a couple of minutes but may be longer
if the phone is using the network to acquire it's location. Location accuracy can vary with time and the actual location so if you don't receive an accurate enough location you can try this again later. |
| Lock. You can send lock with or without a lock timeout value. If you send a lock timeout value such as lock,5 this will set the screen time out to 5 seconds and will also set the maximum allowable lockout policy
to 5 seconds. When you recover your phone you will not be able to set it again to a longer time until you disable Find Me as a device administrator. To do this go to "Settings-Security-Select Device Administrators" and temporarily deactivate it as an administrator to remove this policy. |
| Password. This requires any password between 6 and 11 characters. If any other password policy is set on the phone, such as requiring upper and lower case characters, the password you send must also meet those requirements
or the password will not be set. You will receive a confirmation text indication the password change or failure. |
| "Someone has changed my phone number!". This notification will be sent up to five times if the number changes, each time the phone is re started. This count is reset to zero each time you press save on the set up screen. If you get
it back, reset it. |