Does apple find my app really work?

Without going into a story of a stolen Ipad from a studio, has anyone ever had success using the find my app for location tracking?

pucho812 said:

Without going into a story of a stolen Ipad from a studio, has anyone ever had success using the find my app for location tracking?

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Got used at my work successfully when the Amazon delivery guy came in to deliver a package & left his van running.  Iphone was in the van and my boss helped him use "find my phone" to track down the van.

hodad said:

Got used at my work successfully when the Amazon delivery guy came in to deliver a package & left his van running.  Iphone was in the van and my boss helped him use "find my phone" to track down the van.

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wow o.k.  since this has been over a week and the nothing has come up yet as far as an addy or anything I am assuming it has already been erased or they have not used it.

Erasing won't do it. The machine's ID sits in the Secure enclave.

Keeping it offline will prevent it from working, though. I presume a lot of stolen ipads end up as parts machines. A screen is worth about as much as a complete ipad.

Some older iOS devices can be unlocked. It's not easy though. You need hardware, you need to open it up and rewrite the eproms with a known good image.

And since these guys use that image over and over, I presume Apple has an idea about such operations too. At least about the numbers.

I recovered my wife's iPhone with it, i saw it was still at the same location so i pressed the locate ping and whoever had it returned the phone claiming it fell into their purse by accident. The main issue with the app is that the device has to be powered up for the gps to work. You have to look on the app several times because it will show the last known location. If the device got powered up a few days after it went missing you will be able to pinpoint the location.

ubxf said:

I recovered my wife's iPhone with it, i saw it was still at the same location so i pressed the locate ping and whoever had it returned the phone claiming it fell into their purse by accident. The main issue with the app is that the device has to be powered up for the gps to work. You have to look on the app several times because it will show the last known location. If the device got powered up a few days after it went missing you will be able to pinpoint the location.

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Yeah so far, dude has been seeing the following.

The device is reported lost.
It had a name change to “not a stoley” vs it’s original name of “studio iPad”
It comes on at random times usually in the a.m. for like a minute and then is off. It has been tracked all over Hollywood. But it’s never on long enough to be located to a single spot as it is on the move. We suspect some homeless person has it. It would explain everything.
For one thing this proves why you need to be able to lock and unlock your devices which he didn’t have a passcode on it.