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Technology
Find a lost phone that is off or dead
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Losing your phone can leave you in panic mode, especially when the battery dies. The good news is that both Apple and Android offer built-in tools that help you track a missing device even when it is powered off or offline.
With an iPhone, you can use the Find My network on another Apple device or sign in from a browser. With Android, you can use Google’s Find My Device system to see the last known location and secure your phone fast.
This guide walks you through clear steps for iPhone and Android so you know exactly what to do next.
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YOUR PHONE IS TRACKING YOU EVEN WHEN YOU THINK IT’S NOT
You can still find your lost Apple device even when it’s dead. (Apple)
Does Find My work when your iPhone is dead?
Yes, it does. Your iPhone uses low power mode in the background so it stays findable for a period after powering off. If other Apple devices are nearby, your phone can still send out a Bluetooth signal that helps pinpoint the last known location.
You can check this location from any Apple device or a browser.
Use Find My from another Apple device
If you have an iPad, Mac, or another iPhone, you can look up your missing device in seconds. Family Sharing works too, so you can track a shared device even if it is offline. Here is how to do it:
- Open the Find My app
- Tap the Devices tab
- Swipe up to see your full list of devices
- Select your missing iPhone
- View the location on the map
- Tap Directions to navigate to it
- Tap Play Sound if the phone is on and nearby
Steps to use Find My from another Apple device. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
- Turn on Lost Mode by tapping continue at the bottom of the screen to lock it and show a message with a callback number.
- Enter a phone number that can be used when someone finds your iPhone and wants to contact you. Then, tap Next.
- If the screen icon is black, the phone is dead. You will still see the last known location, so you know where to start looking.
Steps to use Find My from another Apple device. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
Find your iPhone from a web browser
If you only have access to a computer or an Android phone, use iCloud.com to locate your device. The browser version gives fewer tools, but it still shows your iPhone on the map. Follow these steps:
- Go to iCloud.com/find
- Sign in with your Apple ID
- Approve two-factor if needed
Steps to find your iPhone from a web browser. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
- Select All Devices
- Choose your missing iPhone
Steps to find your iPhone from a web browser. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
- Use Play Sound if the device is on
- Turn on Lost Mode to lock the phone
Use this method when you have no Apple hardware nearby.
Steps to find your iPhone from a web browser. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
Use the Help a Friend feature in Find My
If you need to borrow another person’s iPhone, avoid signing in to their device directly. That triggers security checks you cannot complete without your missing phone. Instead, use Help a Friend inside the Find My app:
- Open Find My on your friend’s iPhone
- Scroll to Help a Friend
- Sign in with your Apple ID
- View the last known location of your iPhone
This tool bypasses two-factor prompts so you can get your location without any issues.
Steps to use the Help a Friend feature in Find My. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
Can you find an iPhone without Find My
If ‘Find My’ was never enabled, you must retrace your steps. You can check ‘Your Timeline’ in Google Maps if you use that app and have location history on.
Without ‘Find My,’ there is no way to remotely lock, track, or erase the device.
Once you recover your phone, turn on ‘Find My’ and enable ‘Send Last Location’ so you are covered next time.
Best iPhone settings to turn on before your device goes missing
Before your iPhone ever goes missing, take a minute to set up these key protections.
1) Turn on Find My iPhone
This keeps your device trackable whether it is on or off. Go to Settings, then tap your name, then click Find My, then Find My iPhone and enable it.
2) Enable Send Last Location
Go to Settings, then tap your name, then click Find My, then Find My iPhone and scroll down and enable Sent Last Location.
Your phone will save its final location before the battery dies.
3) Turn on Find My network
Go to Settings, tap your name, click Find My, then tap Find My iPhone and enable Find My network.
This keeps your iPhone discoverable through nearby Apple devices even when it is off or offline.
4) Keep two-factor authentication on
Go to Settings, tap your name, tap Sign-In & Security, select Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), then tap your iPhone and make sure 2FA is turned on.
This blocks anyone from accessing your Apple ID without approval.
5) Use a strong passcode
Go to Settings, then tap Face ID & Passcode, then enter your current passcode.
Tap Change Passcode and follow the prompts to set a unique passcode that is hard to guess.
6) Add a recovery contact
Go to Settings, tap your name, tap Sign-In & Security, then tap Recovery contacts. Then, click Add Recovery Contact.
Add a trusted person as your recovery contact so you can verify your identity if you ever lose your iPhone.
CAN’T FIND YOUR ANDROID PHONE? HERE’S WHAT TO DO TO TRACK IT DOWN
How to find an Android phone that is off or dead
Android users can also track a missing device using Google’s Find My Device system. While you cannot see live location when the phone is powered off, you can view the last known location, lock the phone, or display a message for anyone who finds it. Here is how to track it:
Find your Android from a browser
Settings may vary depending on your Android phone’s manufacturer.
- Go to android.com/find
- Sign in with your Google account
- Select your missing device
- View the last known location on the map
- Select Secure Device to lock it and display a callback message
- Select Play Sound if the phone is on and nearby
Find your Android from another phone
Settings may vary depending on your Android phone’s manufacturer.
- Download the Find My Device app on another Android
- Sign in with your Google account
- Tap your missing phone to view its last known location
If the phone is off or dead, the map will show its last saved location. You can still lock the device or leave a message for whoever finds it.
Best Android settings to turn on before your device goes missing
Before your Android phone ever goes missing, take a minute to set up these key protections.
Settings may vary depending on your Android phone’s manufacturer.
1) Turn on Find My Device
This lets you track your phone or lock it from any browser.
Go to Settings, tap Security & privacy, tap Find My Device or Device Finders and turn it on.
(Names may vary by manufacturer.)
2) Enable Location Services
This improves accuracy and helps Google save your phone’s last known location.
Go to Settings, tap Location and turn on Use Location.
3) Turn on Google Location History
This allows Google to show past locations even when your phone is off.
Go to Settings, tap Location, tap Location Services, then choose Google Location History or Google Location Sharing and turn it on.
4) Add a recovery phone number or email
This helps you verify your identity and recover your account fast.
Go to Settings, tap Google, tap Manage your Google Account, then open the Security tab and add a recovery phone number or email.
5) Use a strong screen lock
Choose a secure lock to keep your data safe.
Go to Settings, tap Security, then Screen lock, and select a PIN, pattern, or password that is hard to guess.
6) Turn on “Send last location” (If available)
Some Android models save the phone’s last known location before the battery dies.
Go to Settings, tap Security & privacy, tap Find My Device and enable Send last location if your device supports it.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
A dead or powered-off phone does not have to stay lost. Apple’s Find My network and Google’s Find My Device system both give you a last known location and fast tools that help you lock or secure your phone. With the right settings in place before anything happens, you can recover your device sooner and protect your personal data.
What would you do first if your phone went missing today? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.
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A long time ago, in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission laid down a rule designed to prevent a monopoly: No one company could broadcast to more than 39 percent of all the TV households in the United States. But then Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Brendan Carr became FCC chairman and immediately kicked off a deregulatory initiative called “Delete, Delete, Delete,” in which Carr vowed to get rid of “every rule, regulation, or guidance document” that placed “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on companies. And within months, Nexstar, which already owned over 200 stations nationwide and had hit its ownership cap, announced that it had entered an agreement to purchase its rival, Tegna, for an estimated $6.2 billion — something that could only happen, however, if Carr agreed to change the FCC’s rules.
If you ask Nexstar why it’s pursuing a merger that would give it control of over 80 percent of the market, it’d point to Big Tech as the culprit. As advertisers take their money to Netflix, YouTube, and other digital streamers, linear television — the local television news, the broadcast affiliates, the basic cable networks — has suffered, forcing them to consolidate and shut down newsrooms. In that sense, Nexstar argued, the merger would help it compete for ad revenue with the streaming services, thereby building more robust local journalism. However, the merger’s opponents believe that this is a basic violation of antitrust laws and principles — not to mention the danger of letting one company have editorial control over the vast majority of America’s local television newsrooms.
But the second Trump administration handles regulatory hurdles a little differently than others, and companies have found that it’s faster to get what they want if they bypass the agencies and talk (read: suck up) to Trump directly. And when Nexstar did so publicly, it confirmed its opponents’ fears about political influence. Last September, in the fraught weeks after the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, Nexstar announced it would no longer broadcast Jimmy Kimmel Live! — a response to Carr’s claim that the FCC could revoke the broadcast licenses of TV stations that aired the comedian’s comments related to Kirk. It briefly led to ABC suspending Kimmel’s show, though ABC and Nexstar soon reversed their decision after a massive nationwide backlash and an ABC boycott.
However, Nexstar’s loyalty to Trump himself was not enough to win over his most powerful MAGA supporters. Newsmax, a cable news network with a deeply pro-Trump bent, and its CEO, longtime Trump donor and outside adviser Chris Ruddy, filed a lawsuit objecting to the merger, claiming that Nexstar’s anticompetitive behavior would force channels like his off the air with steeper carriage fees. He specifically accused Nexstar of jacking up the fees for stations to carry Newsmax, while offering its similar network, NewsNation, for much cheaper.
The Nexstar-Tegna MAGA makeover then took a more subtle turn. NewsNation hired the pro-Trump Fox News commentator Katie Pavlich and gave her her own primetime show. (The network had already hired a slew of former Fox journalists as well.) Around this time, a political group called Keep News Local began airing ads in DC that seemed to directly address Trump, praising him for having “defeated the fake news monopolies before through independent voices and local news” and claiming that the Nexstar-Tegna merger was “crucial for MAGA to survive.” (A little self-contradictory and mildly illogical, but it’s the kind of stuff that Trump likes to hear.) When I last spoke to Ruddy in February, I asked if he’d worried that the dark money going into Keep News Local would sway Trump, and he chose his words carefully: “I think at the end of the day, Trump makes up his own mind. I’m not sure he’s going to be influenced by an ad campaign.”
For months, no one could accurately predict if Trump would override Carr’s wishes and bless the deal, as he’s often done for other companies facing regulatory scrutiny. Trump’s Truth Social posts about the merger have been a good indicator of how precarious the merger has been and who’s been able to influence him at any given moment: Last November, he blasted the deal as an “EXPANSION OF THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS,” but by February, he posted that the deal would “help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition.”
Several current and former NewsNation employees told Status at the time that they feared that the parent company was steering NewsNation away from the centrist, “unbiased” reputation they’d long cultivated. “A lot of people within the network believe that the network has gone hard right to appeal to Trump and Brendan Carr,” one former employee told Status. Coincidentally, days before the deal was finalized, NewsNation began ramping up its explicitly pro-Trump content, tweeting a clip of CNN’s Kaitlan Collins being berated by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, along with the comment “Just going to leave this here.”
When Trump greenlit the merger in mid-March, but before the FCC’s three commissioners could vote on whether to waive the ownership cap, Nexstar and Tegna immediately announced a new complication: Tegna and Nexstar had already started merging. Tegna was no more and CEO Mike Steib had already sold $22.6 million of his company stock.
In response, eight state attorneys general and satellite TV operator DirectTV, which had already been planning to file separate federal antitrust suits against the merger, asked US District Judge Troy Nunley in Sacramento for an emergency restraining order that would prevent Nexstar from taking over Tegna’s assets. The order was granted on March 27th and on April 17, Nunley issued a formal injunction, ruling that Tegna must be operated as an independent financial entity, and Nexstar must take steps to ensure it remains separate from Tegna before further legal proceedings.
For now, Nunley has allowed the states and DirecTV to combine their cases, in which both argue that the merger was a clear violation of antitrust laws and would crush news competition.
Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats in Congress are furious at Carr. On March 30th, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sent the chairman a joint letter admonishing him for allowing his staff to waive the regulations to let the merger pass, instead of having the full commission of political appointees — one from the Biden administration — vote on it. “Under these circumstances,” they wrote, “any subsequent vote risks being largely procedural rather than a genuine exercise of commission responsibility.” They also pointed out that their hasty approval without the commission’s approval would now complicate the merger financially: “In a transaction of this scale, where integration proceeds quickly and unwinding becomes impractical, delay in judicial review can insulate the decision from meaningful challenge.” Notably, though they share similar ideological views on the media and deregulation, Cruz and Carr have frequently clashed over how to achieve their objectives. Cruz previously slammed Carr as a “mafioso,” for instance, for the way he’d used the FCC to silence Kimmel.
But even if it’s legally paused, the journalistic merger’s fallout has started to hit local news. NPR’s David Folkenfirk reported on Tuesday that Tegna journalists had already started receiving orders to stop broadcasting content from major broadcasters like ABC, CBS, and NBC — media outlets being targeted by Carr — and instead begin airing content from Nexstar’s NewsNation.
- Brendan Carr’s views on using the FCC to punish major broadcasters was outlined pretty extensively in the chapter he authored in Project 2025, an initiative led by the conservative Heritage Foundation on how to reform the federal bureaucracy to be more favorable to the American right.
- Exactly how much is local television losing to digital? According to industry publication NewscastStudio, in an investor call defending the purchase, Nexstar chairman Perry Sook cited a market research study from Borrell Associates, which found that “digital advertising in local markets exceeds $100 billion, compared to just $25 billion for local linear television advertising, with nearly two-thirds of digital ad dollars flowing to five major technology companies.”
- If you want to see exactly how much Keep Local News was trying to suck up to Trump, the ads are archived here.
- The Vergecast has a long-running segment called “Brendan Carr is a dummy.”
- The LA Times reported on last week’s preliminary hearings in front of Nunley, and how lawyers for Nexstar, the states, and DirecTV plan to argue their case.
- The Desk has insights from Kirk Varner, a former TV newsroom director, on how the case could go.
- Andrew Liptak covered Nexstar’s previous acquisition sprees for The Verge in 2018.
- Adi Robertson walks through exactly how the Kimmel suspension was an attack on free speech.
- Brendan Carr keeps trying to convince people that he’s not threatening to suspend broadcast licenses for reporting on unfavorable things like the Iran war, reports Lauren Feiner.
- The Vergecast has a long-running segment called “Brendan Carr is a dummy.”
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A Chinese-built humanoid robot beat the human half-marathon world record in Beijing on Sunday, marking a breakthrough moment in a high-stakes global race for technological dominance.
A robot developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor completed the 21-kilometer (13-mile) race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human record of about 57 minutes set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo last month.
The performance marked a dramatic improvement from last year’s inaugural event, when the top robot finished in more than 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Dozens of humanoid robots competed alongside about 12,000 human runners, navigating a parallel course to avoid collisions.
CHINA’S COMPACT HUMANOID ROBOT SHOWS OFF BALANCE AND FLIPS
A robot crosses the finish line in the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon held in the outskirts of Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Andy Wong/AP)
Nearly half of the robots ran using autonomous navigation, while others relied on remote control, organizers said.
Despite the breakthrough, the race still saw glitches, with some robots stumbling at the start or veering into barriers.
Engineers said the winning robot was designed to mimic elite athletes, featuring long legs of about 37 inches and advanced cooling systems to sustain performance.
US TARGETS CHINESE ROBOTS OVER SECURITY FEARS
“Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas,” said Du Xiaodi, an engineer with the Honor team. “For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios.”
Team members celebrate next to the winning Honor Lightning humanoid robot during a medal ceremony after the second Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in Beijing, China, on April 19, 2026. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)
Spectators reacted with a mix of amazement and unease at the machines’ rapid progress.
“It’s the first time robots have surpassed humans, and that’s something I never imagined,” Sun Zhigang, who attended the event with his son, told The Associated Press.
HUMANOID ROBOTS HIT MASS PRODUCTION IN CHINA
“The robots’ speed far exceeds that of humans,” spectator Wang Wen told the outlet. “This may signal the arrival of sort of a new era.”
A robot starts alongside human runners at the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Half Marathon on the outskirts of Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Ng Han Guan/AP)
Experts say the race highlights China’s accelerating push to dominate robotics and artificial intelligence, even as widespread commercial use of humanoid robots remains limited, according to Reuters. The experts said Chinese robotics firms are still working to develop the AI software needed for humanoids to match the efficiency of human factory workers.
Runners take pictures of a humanoid robot during the second Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Haruna Furuhashi/Pool Photo via AP)
“The future will definitely be an AI era,” engineering student Chu Tianqi told Reuters. “If people don’t know how to use AI now … they will definitely become obsolete.”
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The competition underscores a broader technological race between China and the United States, as Beijing invests heavily in advanced robotics as part of its long-term economic strategy.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.
The world’s largest memory makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — are all working to add new fabrication capacity, but almost none of it will be online until at least 2027, if not 2028. SK opened a fab in Cheongju in February, but that is the only increase in production among the three for 2026.
Nikkei says that production would need to increase by 12 percent a year in 2026 and 2027 to meet demand. But according to Counterpoint Research, an increase of only 7.5 percent is planned.
The new facilities will primarily focus on producing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is used in AI data centers. With the companies already prioritizing HBM over general-purpose DRAM used in computers and phones, it’s not clear how much these new fabs will help alleviate the price crunch facing consumer electronics. Everything from phones and laptops, to VR headsets and gaming handhelds have seen price increases due to the RAM shortage.
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