How to find your iPhone even when it’s turned off

As long as Apple’s Find My is enabled, you can find a lost or stolen iPhone by connecting to another device. But how do you locate your phone if its battery dies or someone turns it off?

The answer is nuanced: you may be able to find the phone, but it depends on a few factors. These include how long it’s off, whether the battery is completely dead, and whether the correct Find My settings are enabled (not just the feature itself). With a quick enough response, you may be able to locate your device, even if it’s turned off.

This is crucial because if you lose your iPhone, its battery will slowly drain (unless you lose it while it’s plugged into a charger). Although you can use Find My to force your iPhone to play a sound even if it’s on silent, it requires power to do so. If someone swipes it, it’s likely that disabling it will be one of the first actions they take. And if it’s left somewhere, the remaining battery life will only keep the phone on for a limited period of time.

First of all, you need to understand the difference between Find My and Find My network; These are two connected but distinct features. Find My is the app you use to locate your phone, while Find My Network is the crowdsourced Bluetooth system you need to enable to find your iPhone even if it’s offline. And this may not be enabled by default.

To check these options, go to Settings on your iPhone and select your name at the top. Choose Find My > Find My iPhoneso make sure Find my iPhone And Find my network are both enabled. The first slider is the main functionality, while the second explains that it allows you to locate your phone even when it is offline, in Power Reserve mode or turned off.

Below this option is Send last locationwhich you also need to enable if you haven’t already. This is a protection that allows your iPhone to send its location to Apple one last time as soon as the battery reaches a critical level. Speaking of which, location services (Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services) and Bluetooth (Settings > Bluetooth) must be enabled and iPhone must have sent its location to Find My within the last seven days to locate it.

To check that everything is working, swipe down from the upper right corner of the screen and hold Power icon in the upper right corner. The power off screen will appear, where you should see iPhone found after power off noted under the cursor.

If someone steals your phone, they will likely try to take it offline, making it harder to track. To avoid this, go to Settings > Face ID & Password and scroll to Allow access when locked section. Here, disable Control center so thieves can’t put your phone in airplane mode. They can always turn it off, but it’s better than disconnecting it. It’s safe to go Siri enabled, since Siri will ask you to unlock your phone before sensitive actions like activating airplane mode.

Once you set this up, an iPhone 11 or later with an ultra-wideband chip (which excludes iPhone SE and “e” model devices) running at least iOS 15 is still findable even when it’s turned off. However, the length depends on how the power was lost.

If your phone was turned off manually and still has battery power, you can locate it for about 24 hours after turning it off. And when the battery drops to zero percent, your phone is not completely dead yet. Phones compatible with iOS 15.2 or later enter Power Reserve mode. This is not the same as low power mode which preserves battery life; This is a low-power state that lasts about five hours, in which key Apple Wallet items, such as car keys and transit cards, are still usable. Your phone achieves this by using its last reserve of power to broadcast a low-power Bluetooth signal to other nearby Apple devices, similar to an AirTag.

After that time, you can at least see your phone’s last known location for up to seven days in the Find My app. This could be where you left it (at the airport, at your office, or at the local coffee shop), or the last place it was when someone took it. From there you can try to recover it. If the phone has been missing for more than seven days, you’ll see “no locations found” and you’re out of luck.

In this case, use the Find My app or website on another device to remotely mark it as lost. This will make it show Lost Mode if someone tries to power it on, and with iPhone Stolen Device Protection, Face ID or Touch ID is required to turn it off. You can also display a message on how to contact you to return it if you wish.

Selling, trading in, or giving away your iPhone is the only time you should turn off Find My. Otherwise, this feature should remain enabled. It can help you not only find a lost or stolen iPhone, but also revamped second-generation AirTags and other Find My-enabled non-Apple devices. This also prevents a thief from reusing the device for themselves.