Find your lost phone with Android Device Manager

This reminds me of a rather interesting design decision I encountered with Windows Phone this summer. I&#x27;m still undecided as to whether it is a good design or not.<p>So, over the summer I was traveling through Europe and lost my phone in Italy. I have two factor authentication on for my Microsoft account so this was somewhat of a problem seeing as every way to authenticate myself was with the phone (text, email, auth&#x2F;code app).<p>Then I remembered I could go online and locate my phone through some web-app on windowsphone.com. This seemed like a terrific idea. So I went there, and, unsurprisingly but disappointingly, was unable to login because that app was not excluded from two factor authentication.<p>It was extremely frustrating to say the least.

1) That is an awesome feature, especially being able to ring on max volume when you&#x27;ve silenced your phone earlier. Given my phone is usually on silent, having friends call it to find it between sofas has never worked for me.<p>2) I <i>hate</i> it when websites hijack my browser&#x27;s hotkeys. Google, Alt-Left goes back a page in your history in basically every browser I&#x27;ve used, why did you think it necessary to rewire that for Blogspot?

Thank heavens this feature has finally arrived.<p>People are sometimes surprised when I tell them this is _the_ number one most important feature to me. I sometimes need to give my little siblings a ride from&#x2F;to their workplace -- it&#x27;s a great thing to be able to use iPhone&#x27;s &#x27;Find my Friends&#x27; to see where they are so I know where to pick them up. Or to see where my significant other is if she&#x27;s coming from a different city (and when she asks for directions, I can actually be of help because I know where she actually is).<p>Now, if only iOS and Android had better interoperability... so that I could use my iPhone&#x27;s &#x27;Find my Friends&#x27; app to easily locate my little brother&#x27;s Android phone.

Looks like Google is taking a cue from the many apps that provide a similar service like Android Lost[1]. I hope this is useful for recovering stolen phones but I&#x27;ve read reports that even with the MobileMe location of an i(Phone, Pod) the police don&#x27;t necessarily go after it[2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.androidlost.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidlost.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-14/the-cops-arent-going-to-find-your-stolen-iphone" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessweek.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2013-02-14&#x2F;the-cops-are...</a>

Last year, my android phone was stolen and all I wanted was to remove the content or disable the phone remotely.<p>They claim it&#x27;s possible in a control panel that lists all the android devices belong to you. But that control panel listed none of the devices I used. None of them.<p>When I contacted with Google, they never replied me.<p>I don&#x27;t know the majority experience but each Google service works really buggy for me. The Youtube account I used for years were removed with all the content, I have two Google+ accounts that belong to same e-mail but I can&#x27;t login to the first one, and almost all of the Google services except Gmail and Search is disabled for me. Yes, I enabled everything in the control panel.<p>I would never ever trust any Google service.

I just hope they add some of the great features that Cerberus has, such as taking photos with the front camera, and then e-mailing you the picture (in case someone steals it).<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lsdroid.cerberus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.lsdroid.ce...</a>

Wow, finally a reason to buy Google Glass! Hope now they will deliver Google Car Keys₢

&gt; There will also be an Android app to allow you to easily find and manage your devices.<p>???<p>You use an Android app to find your Android? I guess if you have multiple of them, but I hope they make it available others ways too.

So does this mean that Google is the last major Mobile OS development company to provide this service (behind Apple and Microsoft, respectively)?<p>What took them so long? You&#x27;d figure that it would&#x27;ve come quickly considering Google&#x27;s emphasis on navigation.