Recently a couple approached me at a Sunday morning coffee gathering. I immediately sensed a bit of panic in their voices. Could I help them find a lost phone, they asked?

In short, yes, but with a big “it depends” caveat.

With lost phones, the circumstances are important, and a key element is time. The shorter, the better.

As for that caveat, the key is the phone owner knowing certain access details, without which locating the device electronically is pretty much impossible. Also important is how much charge the phone has.

Both major phone platforms, Android and Apple, offer some form of Find My Phone or Find My Device option. Needless to say, this option needs to be enabled on the lost device. Using it in a loss situation requires the user to authenticate with the service to prove they are the device’s owner.

My immediate line of questioning was straightforward. When was the phone lost, or rather, when did the person realize it was missing? Was the phone charged? Did they have any idea where it might have been lost?

From their answers, I felt the odds of finding the phone were reasonably good. The loss had occurred about an hour earlier, around 8:30 a.m., on a walking trail from home to the coffee gathering. And yes, the phone, an iPhone, was fully charged at the time.

My next step was to use Apple’s Find My Phone service using my laptop, which I fortunately had with me. However, I was immediately stymied. The couple did not know the Apple ID or email address associated with the phone. Without this information, there was no way to use the online service at iCloud.com/find (or google.com/android/find for Android) to get a map showing where the phone was last detected and, ideally, where it still was.

At this point I asked whether they had a rough idea of where the phone might have been lost. They were fairly sure it was near a difficult point in the trail by the riverbank. They had walked the trail many times, and they remembered that spot. 

With other avenues to locating the phone closed, I suggested I drive them to a point where we could get close to the location, drop them off, have them venture into the brush, and call the phone with their other device.

Lo and behold, within 10 minutes someone else on the trail heard the ringing phone and answered it. Shortly afterward, the couple was reunited with their lost device.

A happy ending, indeed, but one that could easily have been unsuccessful had no one been nearby. Why they hadn’t tried calling the phone sooner, I’m not sure.

The bottom line: have a device locator option activated on your phone and know how to use it. Store key information about your device, such as the phone number and any required ID or email address, somewhere you can readily access it. In this case, it would have helped if the couple had stored that information on each other’s phones.

If possible, provide an alternate phone number on your handset’s lock screen. On Android devices this is relatively straightforward. I have done this for years, displaying an email address and landline number on my lock screen. On Apple devices, you may need a widget, or you can embed the information in the lock screen image. You can also add an alternate number to the Medical ID section on an iPhone, which can be accessed from the lock screen.

Be informed about procedures available if your device is lost so it can be locked to prevent unauthorized access. If a phone is likely irretrievably lost, you may want to erase it remotely. Again, with these sorts of measures time is of the essence. If remote disable or erase options are unavailable, immediately call your provider or visit a service provider’s store to have the device’s SIM disabled.

To summarize, here are steps to follow if you lose your phone:

• Check remote tracking for the device.
• Lock the device remotely.
• Wipe data remotely.
• Change key passwords.
• Restore data to a new device.
• Monitor accounts for unusual activity.