Misplacing or getting your phone stolen can be extremely frustrating, especially considering our entire lives are contained on our mobile devices. Google wants to make that process a tiny bit less painless.
The company’s new feature called “find your phone” can assist you through the process of locating your phone or tablet and logging out of accounts so people can’t access your data.
iPhones and Android devices have this feature built in—Find My iPhone through iCloud and the Android Device Manager. Google is simply providing another resource for anyone who’s lost a device.
Unfortunately, it’s not very much help for iPhone users. When you visit the web page, you’ll be prompted to “Visit iCloud.com for help finding your lost iPhone or iPad,” and then Google will tell you to try calling it (through Hangouts, if you feel like it). The only real benefit of this new feature for iPhone users is you can sign out of your phone from the page instead of signing out of sessions via Gmail.
Android users get a bit more functionality from the new feature. You can ring or locate your Android device from the page, leave a call back number on the screen, and sign out of your phone remotely. Google already offers a similar service for Android phones. By enabling “Remotely locate this device” on the Android Device Manager, you can Google Search “Where is my phone?” and find out immediately.
With the update on Thursday, Google also announced new ways to access your account, through voice commands and simply searching your own name via the Google search engine.